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

Hosted by the Canadian Health Promoting Campus Network

“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.

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 explore the following questions:

• Collective impact and Multi-solving – How can universities approach human rights, wellbeing, and sustainability in a unified way that advances all agendas? How can we move societal change beyond intention and into everyday practices?
• 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 on shifting policy, culture, and societal change?
• The Okanagan Charter – What is the role of the Charter in this work for Higher Education?”