One of the most important objectives of the American College Health Foundation is to provide resources for carrying out American College Health Association initiatives to its member colleges, universities, and campus health teams. Our work with the Healthy Campus funding opportunity is a prime example.
By providing two $3,000 award opportunities each year, the ACHF has been making the Healthy Campus concept a reality across the country. ACHA’s vision, mission, and goals have outlined the concept which aims to promote good health, improve academic success, enhance retention of students and staff, achieve better health equity, and foster a spirit of excellent quality of life and health development. The ACHA has also provided the framework for campus health stakeholders to assess and implement their own programming towards accomplishing those goals. However, it is the ACHF’s annual awards that help campuses complete the ever-important step between planning and action, with the financial resources to get such efforts off the ground.
“The toolkit of the MAP-IT (Mobilize Assess, Plan, Implement, and Track) has been essential in our work to achieve our Healthy Campus 2020 goals,” shares Chrystal Woller, BSN, RN—Senior Director of Health & Wellness Services at St. Norbert College. The Wisconsin college was one of the 2017 recipients of the HC2020 Funding award. “However, it was the money from ACHF that allowed us to complete some of the foundational steps in planning our approach—specifically a student survey, and the staff, and resources to compile and share that data.”
Woller, who came from a public health background prior to her work at St. Norbert, explained that there can be an incorrect perception that broad ideas such as ‘better quality of life’ happen best organically. “When rolling out a program that is supposed to benefit multiple different audiences, with a variety of different needs and challenges, a detailed plan is paramount,” she says. “Even though we’re a small campus, we quickly realized the value in forming a co-operative committee that could identify ways we could work together to achieve not only the ACHA objectives, but the ones our students told us they needed and wanted.”
Some of the ACHF funded survey findings at St. Norbert included topics that are high-priority for colleges and universities of all sizes nationwide—such as making the shift towards a tobacco-free campus, developing quiet or green spaces for meditation and reflection, and other environmental enhancements. Other insights were more personalized to St. Norbert’s individual campus dynamic. “We were very interested to find that our students wanted more healthy dining options—but not just in our dining services locations where the teams do excellent work. Students wanted solutions for quick-grab and on-the-go dining that didn’t sacrifice healthy nutrition,” Woller offers. “So, now we’re taking another look at our vending machines across campus, and we’re exploring other ways we can get quick, health-conscious meals in the hands of students more effectively.”
This is one example of how St. Norbert’s Healthy Campus 2020 team is actively pursuing an action-oriented approach for all efforts. Beyond the MAP-IT framework, Woller and her colleagues have integrated the 8 Dimensions of Wellness into their planning process.
“The 8 Dimensions of Wellness model helped us identify all the stakeholders in our Healthy Campus 2020 programming,” Woller continues. “As we move forward from surveying and fact finding to solutions and rollout, we’ve been discovering ways which multiple departments can succeed through overlapping efforts. For instance, our housing teams can benefit from the insights of our counseling staff. Likewise, our faculty can share their observations regarding the emotional needs of our students with on-campus student groups inform those organizations when they’re deciding on programs of their own. What we’re finding with Healthy Campus 2020 is that the framework works and keeps working as long as you’re committed to it.”
The St. Norbert College project, “Building a Culture of Health at St. Norbert College” has been steadily progressing towards implementation on a number of initiatives which are slated to be reviewed, and hopefully approved, by the college President and Board in the upcoming academic year. Woller is also quick to point out that once in place, many of the Healthy Campus initiatives may spiral outward beyond student populations to positively impact faculty, staff, leadership, and even the greater community at large in the city of De Pere where St. Norbert’s is located.
About this Award
In 2020, the Foundation sunset the Healthy Campus Award and is now offering the College Well-Being Award. Learn more about this award here.
Want to support our efforts to promote well-being on campus? Your donations to the ACHF General Fund enable us to offer this award and fund other projects that impact campuses’ ability to promote student well-being.
Support our efforts to promote engagement among nurses and nurse practitioners by donating to the Kathy Mac Fund!
