Expanding Well-Being Initiatives Through Faculty Partnerships
Demand for campus mental health services continues to grow, prompting campus leaders to consider how they can proactively reach students with mental health and well-being support before they reach a point of crisis or require clinical support. Many institutions have explored well-being initiatives to help students develop the resilience and coping skills they need to manage everyday challenges and succeed on campus both personally and academically.
These initiatives are often led by student affairs, but progressive institutions have gone beyond student affairs to integrate these skills into the classroom, curriculum, and other academic settings.
Faculty are a key group whose central role in the student experience makes them prime candidates for collaboration on helping students build the resilience and coping skills they need to succeed on campus. This insight paper outlines EAB’s three recommendations for partnering with faculty and academic colleagues on well-being initiatives.
Recommendation 1: Generate campus buy-in for well-being initiatives
Campus stakeholders may not understand how resilience and coping skills impact student success or how they can contribute to these initiatives on campus. Simon Fraser University uses a multi-pronged approach to cultivate faculty partners and garner buy-in for well-being initiatives.
Recommendation 2: Equip campus partners with resources to make participation easy
Busy schedules, perceived lack of expertise, and resources that are difficult to use may prevent faculty from incorporating well-being concepts into their interactions with students. Providing easy-to-use resources and guidance can facilitate higher participation rates. This section profiles three universities’ strategies to give faculty the tools they need to make participating in well-being initiatives an easy choice
“It was great to have a professor bring up issues of wellness in class and demonstrate how we can use statistics to assess mental and physical health. I felt cared for—like the professor was genuinely interested in our well-being rather than us just churning out good grades.”
– Student in Georgetown’s Engelhard Project
Recommendation 3: Integrate well-being concepts into the classroom
Progressive institutions infuse well-being concepts into the curriculum. Over 150 faculty members at Georgetown University have embedded well-being topics into their existing courses through The Engelhard Project.