Beyond the Walls of the Wellness Center: Creating a Cross-Institutional Well-Being Strategy

College students today report experiencing anxiety, depression, and stress at increased levels, in part exacerbated by living through a pandemic over the last two years but trending that direction regardless. As institutions think about how to support student well-being, it’s no longer sufficient to think solely about the resources within the confines of the university wellness center. While wellness centers, of course, must have adequate mental health and medical resources, we must also be intentional about how the rest of campus contributes to wellness. Our institution’s (Denison University) strategy for raising awareness among the rest of our campus community was through the development of a cross-institutional strategic plan for well-being, developed collectively by faculty, staff, and students.

We’ve been fortunate because, over the last several years, we have experienced a wealth of positive momentum on student well-being: adding new counseling positions, becoming a JED Healthy campus, building a financial wellness program, and being recognized as a 2020 Active Minds Healthy Campus Award winner. On top of all that, we designed, built, and opened a stunning new wellness facility last month.

While we have experienced many successes in student wellness, we recognized the need to create a coherent, integrated strategy to guide our direction. To do so, we created a committee of faculty, staff, and students to develop our cross-institutional strategy for well-being to guide our wellness work over the next several years. Paramount to this plan is inclusion of voices across campus — from senior administrators, faculty, staff, and students — through 1-to-1 and small group interviews to short surveys asking students about their hopes and visions for wellness.

The Heart of Our Plan: Campus Culture

One of the surprising outcomes of our committee’s conversations was that so much of the plan focused on culture and messaging as opposed to programs or services. Rather than focusing on what happens within the walls of the wellness center, our plan focuses on what the rest of campus is doing. But it’s absolutely right: in order to change outcomes, we need to address culture, even though it’s more challenging to do.

Most fundamental to our plan is empowering students to become the agents of their own wellness. Just as we expect students to be the architects of their own lives at Denison, we expect them to be the agents of their own well-being. While we provide many tools and resources to help students manage their wellness, students are ultimately responsible for managing their own well-being. In recent years, we’ve observed a campus narrative around rigor and high expectations being antagonists to wellness; therefore, we need to help students understand that our institution is rigorous by design, and our goal is to stretch them to grow intellectually, socially, personally, and professionally. To support them during that stretch, we must help them build the habits and skills that promote their wellness not only during their time in college but sustain them throughout their lives as well.

Another significant piece of our wellness strategic plan is decentering counseling. While counseling is absolutely a key resource, it should not be the frontline resource for helping students to manage stress. It should not be the first recommendation we make to a student experiencing an emotion or shedding tears in our offices. Instead of referring every stressed student to the counseling center, we need to help students recognize how sleep, nutrition, movement, social connection, time spent outdoors, all impact our mental health.

Strategies

In our strategic plan, regardless of the goal, our methods oftentimes center on three strategies: 1) reframing messages, 2) equipping faculty and staff, and 3) communicating effectively and abundantly.

1). Reframing Messaging: Most critically, we must reframe messages on campus and help students to see their own agency in their wellness — that some of how they feel is connected to their food selections in the dining hall, the amount of sleep they got the night before, how much time they’re spending outdoors, and the movement they get. While not all aspects of our wellness are within our control, there are elements we have direct control over.

To change the narrative of wellness on campus, we are reframing our messages in admission materials, orientation speeches, all-student communications, faculty, and staff professional development, and even the 1-1 everyday conversations. Intentionally or unintentionally, students receive messages about wellness every single day from us, and we need to pay more attention to what we might unintentionally convey to students.

2) Equipping Faculty and Staff with the Language and Tools They Need: In order for this new approach to be infused throughout campus, we must provide faculty and staff with language, tools, and knowledge of resources. We should educate them on the offerings in the wellness center beyond counseling. We should provide them with a few questions they could ask students about how they are managing their wellness. When we observe faculty and staff over-referring students experiencing any emotion to counseling, it’s because we haven’t sufficiently equipped them with other tools, like questions to ask to help students think about their wellness.

3) Communicate Effectively and Abundantly. So much of the work we need to do on campus is helping students, faculty, and staff to know what resources exist. Especially as college campuses emerge from COVID response, where college health centers were COVID-central in managing testing and response, we must help our community, especially students, remember the multitude of resources available to them — primary medical care, individual counseling, mindfulness sessions, cycling, Pilates, Zumba, outdoor, and opportunities to de-stress. We have to help faculty, staff, and students know the full breadth of opportunities so that they can connect students appropriately.

Closing

When you establish a campus-wide approach to wellness, you signal to your campus partners what matters. They can identify how their work intersects with the overall wellness strategy. They are able to help you champion this work. They are able to align messaging. In a matter of months, we have already begun to see the value of having colleagues understand the strategy for wellness.

When we have a shared language and common playbook, we can all work toward advancing the goals. To do this work and to truly make an impact, we need allies across campus, and when your allies know what you’re trying to achieve, they can help contribute to those goals and can be advocates and champions. Without that shared playbook, we all just do scattered initiatives without a strategy to direct that work.

For us at Denison, the development of a cross-institutional wellness strategy has become key to signaling our vision and aligning champions and allies for this work. If universities only support student wellness within the walls of their wellness centers, we will not be able to achieve the culture change we need to truly impact the wellness of our students.