It is with great enthusiasm that the UC Irvine Institute for Clinical and Translational Science; Wellness, Health, and Counseling Services; and City Councilwoman and former Mayor of Irvine, Beth Krom, present a novel and critical undertaking to improve the health of students and staff on academic campuses: UCI Healthy Campus Initiative. This initiative aims to bring together key stakeholder groups to initiate and sustain continual improvements in campus health at UC Irvine, to study the process of implementing a Healthy Campus Initiative across institutions of higher education nationally, and work in tandem with the University of California Office of the President’s Healthy Campus Network Initiative.
Our vision for the UCI Healthy Campus Initiative is to engage top tier UCI administration, departmental and program administrators, students, and community advisors to implement a Healthy Campus initiative. Our Initiative follows a framework called MAP-IT(Mobilize, Assess, Plan, Implement, and Track). This process entails forming stakeholder groups; identifying sources of data, existing programming and resources, and priority issues; planning an expansion of effective existing programs and infrastructure, and innovating new interventions where necessary; implementing, researching, and communicating the plan and process; and tracking progress.
We have engaged a national leader in campus health, Dr. Amelia Arria, from the University of Maryland, to assist us in our Healthy Campus Initiative. Dr. Arria, an Associate Professor of Behavioral and Community Health, and Director of the Center on Young Adult Health and Development, will lead the research effort to study the implementation of the Healthy Campus Initiative across several national universities. Dr. Arria is the principal investigator of the College Life Study, a longitudinal study of risk behaviors and untreated mental health and substance abuse among college students, and she directed the development of the Maryland Collaborative to Reduce College Drinking, a 10-campus coalition focused on addressing the problem of excessive alcohol consumption among college students.
To learn more about this project, please contact Luis Cendejas at lcendeja@uci.edu, or (949) 824-9560.
