After spending a year away from university due to illness, Stephanie Aitken returned to the University of British Columbia feeling the need to restore her wellbeing and work to empower others in the community to do the same.
A UBC Master of Landscape Architecture candidate and a UBC Sustainability Scholar, Stephanie spent 2015 working with Wellbeing at UBC as part of their “Conversations in Wellbeing” project. The initiative seeks to build a happier, healthier and more sustainable campus communities.
“My desire to promote wellbeing comes from both academic pursuits as well as personal experience. As part of my studies in Landscape Architecture, I focused on the interface between social and environmental wellbeing,” says Stephanie.
Wellbeing is seen as an important issue to address in order to facilitate faculty, staff and students to reach their full potential, both at a personal and institutional level. The Canadian Index of Wellbeing shows that the way Canadians engage in relationships that promote individual and collective wellbeing has improved significantly from 1994 to 2010.
“Research tells us wellbeing is fundamental to deeper learning, retention and productivity,” says Matt Dolf, Director of Strategic Support with Wellbeing at UBC.
Working in collaboration with fellow UBC Sustainability Scholar Jenna Dunsby, Stephanie helped produce a draft engagement strategy for UBC as part of a three-part report series.
“The purpose of engagement is to enable the campus community to tell their own wellbeing stories and let them build the Wellbeing at UBC initiative’s narrative. I understand wellbeing to be not a ‘final destination’, but rather an ongoing journey or process in and of itself,” fellow colleague Jenna says.
Four principles, developed in collaboration with the community, helped inform the engagement strategy, according to the report: inspire a ‘wellbeing’ movement from the beginning/inside-out, engage people in surprising ways, facilitate innovation through collaboration, and work towards a ‘living strategy.’
“As we looked at various ways to engage the community, we realized we need to not just inform the community, but involve them in the decision-making of what our approach to wellbeing should look like,” says Stephanie.
The report suggests the importance of catering to diverse groups, backing grassroots initiatives with higher level policy, enabling community members to disseminate knowledge, finding support in administrative channels and providing real provision for change to avoid perceptions of tokenism.
The reports also identifies relevant resources and community engagement approaches at UBC and other settings, and identifies potential targets and indicators towards success.
The international conference on health promotion and wellbeing UBC hosted at the Okanagan campus in the Summer of 2015, culminating in the global adoption of the Okanagan Charter for Health Promoting Universities, helped inform the reports.
The Sustainability Scholar projects are part of a wider UBC effort to foster wellbeing on and off campus. The university seeks to engage students, staff and faculty holistically across five priority areas including mental health and resilience, food and nutrition, physical activity and sedentary behavior, built and natural environments and inclusion and connectivity.
“It is my hope that the Wellbeing at UBC Initiative will create the conditions by opening space for meaningful dialogue and participation, ensuring that ‘Wellbeing’ on the UBC campus is a lived experience,” says Stephanie.
UBC has a platform for students to assess their wellbeing and learn more about how to engage with their communities. Faculty and staff can access a number of health and wellbeing resource through UBC Human Resources.