Leveraging the Okanagan Charter to Bounce Forward From the Three Major Crises of our Time: COVID-19 Pandemic, Systemic Racism, and the Climate Emergency

Wednesday, December 9, 2020 10:00 am - 11:30 am EST (GMT -05:00)

UBC, UW and McGill University Logos

The Canadian Health Promoting Campus Network and the Universities of British Columbia, Waterloo, and McGill invite you to join them in a dialogue that will investigate:  

  • Collective impact and Multi-solving - How can universities approach human rights, wellbeing, and sustainability in a unified way that advances all agendas?  
  • Bridging the divide - What mechanisms are needed to bridge the academic and operations divide? How do we link policy and operations to achieve results? 
  • Engaging leadership - How do we convene conversations with various levels of leadership across the university? 
  • Addressing systems - How can we structure this work to focus less on individual actions and instead toward shifting policy, culture, and societal change? 
  • The Okanagan Charter - What is the role of the Charter in this work for Higher Education? 

Speakers include:

  • Prof. Santa J. Ono (UBC President) 
  • Ainsley Carry (UBC VP Students) 
  • Angela Campbell (Associate Provost, Equity and Academic Policies, McGill University) 
  • Mat Thijssen (Director of Sustainability, University of Waterloo) 
  • Grace Nosek (Founder and Student Director of the UBC Climate Hub, PhD Candidate, Allard School of Law) 
  • Sylvia Cheuy (Consulting Director, Collective Impact, Tamarack Institute)  

Post-secondary institutions face complex issues around health and wellbeing, including the implications surrounding the global COVID-19 pandemic, the climate emergency, and the renewed urgency to address systemic racism for historically racialized communities.

The Okanagan Charter for Health Promoting Universities & Colleges provides us with a common language, principles, and framework to address these pressing systemic issues as it calls on higher education institutions to embed health into everyday operations, business practices and academic mandates.