Members of the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus community are invited to review and edit content for the forthcoming common agenda from the university’s Well-being Collective.
Officially called the “Well-being Influencer Tour,” a series of upcoming feedback sessions offer participants the opportunity to shape and influence the future of well-being on campus.
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Each event includes a history of the Well-being Collective, the Okanagan Charter that inspired it, and data points to inform the proposed common agenda.
The common agenda will steer the continued work of the Well-being Collective to embed holistic well-being practices throughout the university, and will help establish key performance indicators. These will be shared with the community along with regular updates on progress.
The agenda will be finalized later this spring and periodically reviewed and revised.
The sessions will take place Jan. 31 at the Michigan Union, Feb. 6 at Pierpont Commons and Feb. 8 at the Rackham Graduate School. In addition, a virtual experience is available through the end of February.
“Input at this stage is so vital. The more feedback we have, the more authentic and informed our agenda becomes,” said Mary Jo Desprez, director of health promotion and Wolverine Wellness, which serves as the backbone structure for the Well-being Collective.
“People will be inspired by how much of this work may impact them individually as well as the broader campus community.”
Established in 2022, the Well-being Collective has developed formal networks, a steering committee and an advisory council to gather input from a diverse representation of faculty, staff and students with the long-term goal of ensuring inclusive health and wellness principles are infused in all systems and policies across campus.
This work is guided by an evidence-based model known as collective impact, which brings organizations and units together to tackle complicated social problems and foster lasting change. The common agenda is the next step in that model.
The impact of the Well-being Collective to date includes creating an interactive mental health continuum of care and extending the break between fall and winter terms on the Ann Arbor campus to allow for a longer period of rest and recovery.
“The extended semester break is an excellent example of the power of collective impact in advancing health promotion. Here we have a regental-level policy change from the Provost’s Office that directly improves the well-being of our community,” said Robert Ernst, chief health officer, executive director of University Health Service and associate vice president for health and wellness in Student Life.
Ernst is co-chair of the collective’s advisory council along with Preeti Malani, special adviser to the president and professor of internal medicine at Michigan Medicine.
Laurie McCauley, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, and Martino Harmon, vice president for student life, are co-executive sponsors of the Well-being Collective.
The collective was created as a result of U-M adopting the Okanagan Charter, as part of a series of recommendations made by the Student Mental Health Innovative Approaches Review Committee. In 2021, U-M became one of the first U.S. universities to adopt the charter, an international agreement to embed health and wellness into all aspects of campus culture.
