In my capacity as the Co-Chair of a student-led wellness umbrella group (Penn Wellness Student Coalition or PWSC) at the University of Pennsylvania, I would like to work in tandem with the official wellness administration at my university (called Wellness@Penn) to spearhead a series of wellness-specific dialogues with our diverse community groups on campus. In recent years, the COVID pandemic has displaced the importance of mental and other domains of wellness in favor of physical health, and we would like to bring back some of that focus on holistic wellness through discussion-based activities that attempt to provide a non-judgemental, open space for students to share their struggles with mental health and other wellness issues, as well as to create a feedback mechanism for UPenn’s wellness administration to improve and tailor their services to the diverse population on campus. I believe this is in line with United Nation’s SDG 3 Good Health & Wellbeing and is especially important during challenging times of global and local conflict, which is shifting the attention of students and administrators into politics, grief and confusion and away from community wellbeing, healing and mutual understanding.
More specifically, we plan to host at least 3 dialogues each semester of the 2024-25 academic year, tailored for a specific population group, e.g. student athletes, first generation low income students, students identifying as LGBTQ+, school or academic-specific groups for example engineering, nursing students, pre-med, faculty groups and others. These dialogues are intended to be small and focused to facilitate a meaningful and vulnerable sharing moment between those who share a similar background, so about 15-40 people per discussion groups. We will attempt to take notes and perform thematic analysis of these discussions to make change recommendations for the current system of wellness services. Additionally, while it is hard to quantify what the dialogues would bring personally to each student, I hope that it gave them a chance to share difficult feelings previously unsaid and connect with others. More intangibly, we want this initiative to be a part of a larger efforts to change the culture surrounding wellness at Penn, which is often pre-professional, does not place priority on wellness and reactive to events of unwellness (e.g. suicide). This will also fuel into our efforts of developing a Penn-specific assessment tool for wellness basing on our 8 domains of wellbeing. Taken altogether, these dialogues will culminate in a larger Wellness Summit open dialogue event that engages our entire Penn community from administration, faculty staff, students leaders to students at the end of the academic year.