SLC hosts Community Mental Health and Well-Being Strategy consultation and discusses Sep. 6 Board of Governors post-report
By Andreea Timis, September 25 2024—
An SLC meeting took place on Sep. 9. The first half of the meeting centred around the consultation of the renewed Community Mental Health and Well-Being Strategy (CMHWS), which aims to enhance current policies at the U of C related to mental health promotion and crafting practical recommendations to create a safe and inclusive space.
In December 2015, U of C launched the Campus Mental Health Strategy (CMHS), which highlighted six strategic areas of focus — personal resilience and self-management, early identification and response, direct service and support, institutional policies, processes and procedures, supportive campus environment and raising awareness and promoting well-being.
Andrew Szeto — director of mental health strategy — explained that while the CMHS has been successful these last seven years, there were still gaps in the strategy that needed to be addressed.
“The strategy was a good [one], but it was a strategy of its time,” Szeto said. “There are things that we needed to address specifically within a new strategy.”
Szeto went on to mention that campus community engagement was key in taking steps to develop updates to the CMHS. This was accomplished through various surveys, events and data collection from focus groups in order to better understand the needs of the student community.
“We had 40 plus consultations with different community units. So what we did was take all of this data and developed our strategy,” he said. “And we’re really proud of what we came up with, because it’s a strategy of our campus community.”
In collaboration with the Institutional Sustainability Strategy, the CMHS committee also engaged with an Elders leadership circle, where they learned about Indigenous perspectives through stories and wisdom to better advise their renewal strategy.
From all these consultations, three major themes emerged: adopting a holistic approach to promoting understanding of mental health, placing focus on more proactive approaches to addressing mental health and shifting academic culture to build a more supportive environment.
“We need to address all these other aspects that determine our well-being. So social connection, spirituality, as well as academics,” Szeto explained. “[We] also really need to focus on a shift upstream. So to really think about [physical] and mental health promotion [and] illness prevention. The more we do these upstream shifts, the less students that might have to access counselling because they’ve engaged in other resources beforehand.”
The renewed strategy was passed to the Board of Governors (BoG) in May 2024 and was formally approved.
Szeto mentioned that the strategy has four guiding principles, which are listed in detail at the bottom of the strategy renewal website, along with each of their core components.
The next step is then to develop an action plan via an evaluation strategy. Jennifer Tannhauser — CMHWS evaluation lead — spoke about the necessity for more integrated evaluation throughout the work of the strategy.
“Our goal with the evaluation framework is really to embed evaluation in all aspects of the work of the strategy, and work on building our collaborative relationships with the different faculties, departments and groups on campus to collaborate on gathering all relevant data so that we can inform the work of the strategy,” said Tannhauser.
Tannhauser further explained that the data collected will greatly help demonstrate the CMHWS’s progress and inform the ongoing revision and development to ensure the strategy stays aligned with the needs of the campus community.
“Systems are very complex and so it can be challenging to tease apart what is influencing what type of change,” she said. “And this is very true when we’re working on system changes within a post-secondary campus [with] multiple moving parts and systems happening.”
For this reason, Tannhauser stated that the CMHWS committee chose to move forward with a principles-focused evaluation approach, which focuses on the how of change as opposed to just the what.
“So we can do these big global assessments on student well-being, such as the Canadian Campus Well-Being Survey. That gives us a snapshot in time of students’ mental health and well-being, but we don’t know what’s actually contributing to the change,” Tannahauser explained. “And so this evaluation approach is going to help us figure out what’s really contributing to change and where we might need to continue to make adjustments.”
Szeto mentioned that the committee will consult with a board advisory council in October to stay informed on campus community well-being, as well as a leadership group to engage with executive leadership on campus.
Additionally, the committee hopes to further engage with SLC for updates regarding the student community and the outcomes from the newly implemented strategy. Questions were posed to SLC regarding collaboration opportunities with student groups, thoughts on how student mental health data is collected and shared, as well as how can SLC and the student population be best engaged with in data collection and mobilization efforts related to the strategy moving forward.
A suggestion was made by faculty of Engineering representative Debojeet Dam to potentially offer more events covering lived-experience topics and specific issues, as well as broadcasting these events on social media platforms — which are more interactive and more often checked by students.
“The biggest thing I’ve noticed throughout my years [at U of C] is that a lot of these mental health events are very young. And that’s why students, when they see those emails, [think] ‘oh, it’s another one of these’,” said Dam. “Instead of advertising an event and lowering the email to just bullet points of what the event contains, I want to know what specific things they’ll talk about.”
Sasha Lavoie — senior communications specialist — responded to this point.
“There are lots of students who run really great workshops on [mental health topics], but I think we struggle with information overload and students receiving so many emails that we always wonder about how we can better share those events with students who may need them,” Lavoie said.
Julia Law — SAPL faculty representative — seconded Dam’s point and added that social media efforts to target specific faculties within U of C through social media would better reach students as well.
“I definitely think connecting with people at their niches, even just someone bringing themselves in that niche temporarily, is a good way to connect with students. Whether it be through a workshop specifically targeted to that faculty, basically advertise [the event] to bring about some community engagement,” Law said.
The second half of the SLC meeting focused on the Sep. 6 BoG meeting post-report, presented by BoG student-at-large representative Siraaj Shah and SU President Ermia Rezaei-Afsah.
The focus of the BoG meeting was the SU 2024-25 Strategic Plan, whose approval was passed at the last SLC meeting. Rezaei-Afsah mentioned that the BoG gave a brief update regarding engagement with the province.
“It’s much of the same that they’ve been asking for. Targeted enrollment, so funding for specific areas that the university will see improvement in,” said Rezaei-Afsah. “One of these is the Olympic Oval, because they don’t see that the government is willing to invest wholly in operating funding. Now that’s not something that the SU necessarily agrees with, but that’s part of the university’s strategy.”
Faculty of Arts representative Martin Al-Najar raised a concern about the U of C’s entrepreneurial approaches being focused only on select faculties.
“It is 100 per cent one of our major concerns that on our end is that we want to ensure that the institution doesn’t become entirely focused on a couple of specific faculties,” Shah answered. “So one of the things that the institute has mentioned is just ensuring that there’s lots of multidisciplinary [and] more unique student experiences that are related to entrepreneurship in all different types of faculties.”
Rezaei-Afsah added to this point by mentioning that some of the incoming funds have not been flowing into some of the faculties not necessarily considered to be ‘entrepreneurial’ and that this could be an area to flag down for the future.
For agendas, minutes and upcoming SLC meetings, visit the SU website.