Building Mental Health Resiliency for a Sustainable Campus Community

"Building Mental Health Resiliency for a Sustainable Campus Community" is a pilot project that is the first step to systematically understanding and supporting the mental health and wellness of students attending the University of Alberta, Augustana Campus. The long-term goal of this project is find innovative ways to decrease the prevalence of stress, anxiety and depression in undergraduate students. As a first step to achieving this long term goal, the project will use an adapted health promotion model PRECEDE/PROCEDE ('PRECEDE' Predisposing, Reinforcing, and Enabling Constructs in Educational/Environmental Diagnosis and Evaluation and 'PROCEED' Policy, Regulatory, and Organizational Constructs in Educational and Environmental Development) to identify predisposing, enabling and reinforcing factors that may determine and influence mental health resiliency in the student population.

Expected outcomes include:

1. A systematic methodology for the identification of and increased knowledge of mental health resilience;
2. Programming resources for, and evaluation of, proximal and distal drivers of mental health and wellness at the University of Alberta; and
3. Evaluated resources for strategies to improve mental health and resilience at the undergraduate level that respond and build upon 1 & 2.

This two-year project is scheduled to begin in the late spring of the 2017. The first year of the project will focus on gathering data from the student population using quantitative and qualitative (arts-based) methodologies. The 2018/2019 calendar year will transform the first year project results into the design, development and feasibility assessment of evidence-informed service delivery models and programming to increasing resiliency in students at Augustana Campus and beyond.

This project is funded through the University of Alberta's Sustainability Enhancement Fund.