Call for Summit 2016 Planning Committee Members

Dear Community of Practice Members,

The 2015-16 school year is primed to be filled with lots of advancements and momentum building on the International Conference, continued efforts on campuses in BC and across Canada to develop and implement campus mental health and wellbeing strategies, innovations in the area of changing the culture of alcohol and other substance use, as well as the current priority around sexual violence policies.

We look forward to helping you connect, discover, inspire and co-create!

If you are interested in joining the Summit 2016 Planning Committee, please email shaylyn.streatch@cmha.bc.ca by Friday, September 25th.

Do you have a topic that you would like to suggest for an upcoming webinar? Click here to share your idea.

In This Update:

- Food for Thought

- Spotlight on New Resource from SFU

- Engagement Strategy Idea from Selkirk College

- Spread the Word to Your Student Leaders

- New Group - "Poking the Elephant"

- Register for Lunch & Learn Webinar

- Stay Tuned for a Special Newsletter on the International Conference and New Charter

Upcoming Webinars

Food for Thought

The Tripartite Mission of Higher Education: learning, civic engagement and well-being

Where is your campus on the Arc of Change? (view here)
1. Awareness/Confrontation with current paradigm
2. Understanding/Considering strategies and clarity of objectives
3. Implementation/Investment in means, processes and models
4. Assessment/Evaluation of effectiveness and costs
5. Sustainability/Priorities
6. Awareness/Confrontation of a new paradigm

source: The Well-being and Flourishing of Students

Stay tuned for a new book from Bringing Theory to Practice summer 2016: Well-being and Higher Education. In the meantime, check out their other resources here >>

â€œInstitutions that give attention to well-being cultivate and sustain a campus culture for learning that exhibits a commitment to public as well as private aims. But how does an institution do so? How does it construct and sustain a culture that exhibits and values individual and community well-being, a deeper and connected sense of the civic, and the purpose of preparing for meaningful life choicesâ€”including meaningful work? â€¦ The hard part is that constructing and sustaining a culture requires redirecting resources and realigning priorities. But while this is hard, it is not mysterious.â€
- Don W. Harward, Director, Bringing Theory to Practice Project

Spotlight on New Resource

A number of new resources have been shared in the online community platform. In the spirit of the beginning of a new academic year, we want to take the opportunity to highlight the new casebook produced by SFU Health Promotion, a division of Health and Counselling Services.

Do you know of a resource others might be interested in? Share it in the online community.

SFU Casebook: Embedding Conditions for Well-being in Academic Settings

The opportunities to enhance well-being in academic settings include: social connection, supportive institutional culture, reducing undue stress, opportunities for personal development, strengthening balance and resilience, inclusivity, and involvement and engagement.

"The Well-being in Academic Settings casebook is intended to build upon our Well-being in Learning Environments resources in order to work with academic units (e.g. departments and faculties) more broadly in creating conditions for well-being. The Well-being in Learning Environments resource focuses specifically on how instructors can create conditions for well-being within the courses they teach, whereas the Well-being in Academic Settings casebook highlights how programs, spaces, policies and processes within academic units can be designed in ways to enhance well-being. Together, these two projects provide a more comprehensive approach to creating conditions for well-being within academic units."
- Alisa Stanton, Health Promotion Specialist, SFU

Engagement Strategy Idea

Inspired by the webinar on SFU's Well-being in Learning Environments resources, Selkirk College has developed an initiative they are rolling out this fall to engage instructors and staff.

Their new Healthy Learning Environments group is launching a poster, lunch and learn, and employee group spotlight initiative for all staff. This initiative will feature one topic each month, for example social connection. Flip chart sized posters with a brief description of the topic and suggestions for fostering it both inside and outside the classroom will appear on each campus. The posters will also have blank space where staff will be invited to add their own promising practices and tips. Suggestions will be collected, collated and posted on MySelkirk. Lunch and learns for staff related to the monthly topics will be hosted and employee groups will be featured in the Grapevine.

Thank you to Theresa Southam, the Teaching and Learning Institute Coordinator at Selkirk College, for sharing this idea! We look forward to hearing how it goes.

Spread the Word to Your Students

A new academic year brings with it new students! We invite you to take the initiative to make sure that students and student leaders on your campus who may have an interest in campus mental health get invited to join the provincial Student Leaders and Recent Alumni Group.

Learn more about this group here >>

You may also be interested in sharing with your students the article from The Mighty that has
34 Mental Health Tips for Students.

New Group - "Poking the Elephant"

During the Healthy Minds | Healthy Campuses post-conference meeting in Kelowna, folks expressed an interest in organizing a regular time to convene via teleconference to keep each other on track and inspired. Following the meeting, Brandon from TRU created a group to put this idea into action. Now that summer is over and the semester is underway, it is time to get started.
Interested?

You can find out more and join the group here >>

Register for Lunch & Learn Webinar

September 29 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Using the Online Community Platform

aka the â€œplatform,â€ â€œvirtual office,â€ â€œplay space,â€ â€œrepositoryâ€ and â€œsandboxâ€

Another idea that emerged out of the post-conference meeting was to host a webinar on using the online platform. In response, we are organizing a lunch & learn for anyone who is interested.

You will learn about each section of the online community to help you make the best use of all it has to offer. All members are encouraged to bring their trouble shooting questions and any recommendations they have for tweaks to the site based on their experience.

Stay Tuned...

Stay tuned for a special newsletter on the International Conference on Health Promoting Universities and Colleges and release of the new Charter!

In the meantime, check out some of the presentations now available on the conference website and view below two relevant articles by Trevor Hancock published in the Times Colonist after the conference.

Excerpts from: How healthy are universities and colleges?

"The mentally unhealthy state of our universities and colleges should be a major concern to the faculty and administration, as well as the students themselves. This level of stress is undermining the ability of universities to carry out one of their core missions: To help students learn."

"There is a central principle in systems design that applies to any organization: Every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it gets. So it seems that we have designed our universities and colleges to generate high levels of stress, anxiety and depression, and thus to undermine their core educational mission."
- Read more >>

Excerpt from: Making our universities and colleges healthy

"In thinking about how to change the university or college setting to make it more healthy, it helps to consider four aspects of that setting: the natural, built, social and organizational environments."
- Read more >>

Forward

Read Later

If you are not already signed up for the Healthy Minds | Healthy Campuses online social learning community, visit http://community.healthycampuses.ca
to join today!

For immediate support in using the online community, view the
How-To-PDF Guide or the How-To-Video Guide.

You can also register to participate in the Lunch & Learn on September 29th.