Leah State aims to make Sheridan a healthier campus to live, work, and learn in.
State is the manager for wellness and counselling at Sheridan. She wants to provide an opportunity for people to provide feedback with regards to wellness and what the community’s priorities should be.
“It shouldn’t just be my decision or [the Director’s] decision as to where to start, we need the community to say okay we know this is a long-term plan but over the first year or three year you must start here,” State said.
Tammy Datars is the manager of Sheridan’s health clinics at the college’s three campuses. She said that gathering feedback from people that a strategy directly affects is important.
“If you are going to design a wellness strategy that is supposed to affect faculty and students, you need to actually find out what the students, faculty, and staff feel wellness is in their world, because you can start all kinds of initiatives and say okay this is the wellness strategy, but if it doesn’t relate to anybody that that’s wellness for them, then it’s not going to be an effective use of a strategy,” said Datars.
In order to do this, feedback sessions for Sheridan’s community wellness strategy will take place at the Davis campus on January 23 from 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. in room M9 and at the Trafalgar campus on January 31 from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at the conference centre. There, students can ask questions, make comments, express concerns, or offer suggestions regarding the college’s wellness strategy.
The strategy is called Sheridan 2024: Galvanizing Education for a Complex World. It is grounded in principles outlined in the Okanagan Charter, an international charter that promotes health on university and college campuses.
State explained that while a lot has been done about wellness at Sheridan, it hasn’t necessarily been coordinated.
“There was no shared definition [for wellness], there was no opportunity for people to connect about wellness issues, it was all done in these silos. So I think the point of this is to recognize amazing work that’s already been done, amplify it, and make it a bit more cohesive under the strategy so that there’s some direction,” State said.
Students must register to attend the feedback sessions or can submit anonymous feedback through Sheridan’s wellness strategy website.
