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

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

Missed the live panel? Watch the recorded session on the Canadian Health Promoting Campuses website.

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.