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

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.