April 3, 2025
Universities around the United States will raise awareness in April about nationwide efforts to embed health and wellness in all aspects of campus life under an international framework called the Okanagan Charter.
Developed by health promotion scholars and professionals around the globe in 2015, the charter is an aspirational document that guides colleges and universities to be leaders in the world for developing and modeling health-promoting principles.
Between April 21 and April 25, the inaugural U.S. Health Promoting Campuses Week will honor the charter’s 10th anniversary and success and the creation of the U.S. Health Promoting Campuses Network (USHPCN), which supports the work of member campuses.
Since 2021, 38 U.S. campuses have adopted the charter and 320 have joined the USHPCN to make meaningful changes by bringing together multidisciplinary teams to maximize resources and work collaboratively to impact health on a population level. The growth of the network provides widespread recognition that in order to create thriving communities, attention must be paid to the health of the planet, creation of safe communities, and access to health promotion and health care.
“This week, we celebrate the bold steps campuses are taking to embed health and well-being into every facet of campus life. As chair of the U.S. Health Promoting Campuses Network, I am inspired by the collective commitment of institutions across the country that are reimagining higher education as a catalyst for human and planetary flourishing—on every campus, everywhere,” said Sislena Grocer Ledbetter, associate vice president of Counseling Health and Wellbeing at Western Washington University.
Throughout the week, campuses from the USHPCN will be sharing their success stories of how they are making smart business decisions to create communities where students, faculty and staff experience well-being like those below.
Since adoption of the charter, Cornell University created a community of practice that engages faculty, staff and students leading to research that identified predictors of flourishing to inform work, policy changes to create credit caps in colleges and schools to support student mental health, and the creation of additional floating holidays for employees.
The University of Colorado Boulder created a well-being systems map that allowed the university to identify the strengths and gaps in the system while reorienting programs in a way to support access for different campus populations and begin to reduce the duplication of services.
“The adoption of the charter created a launch pad for us to center the well-being of students, faculty and staff, and intentionally strengthen the health of the entire campus by aligning efforts rather than working as independent actors,” said Kat Dailey, assistant vice chancellor of Health and Wellness at CU Boulder.
The University of California, Los Angeles continued a number of programs to promote well-being over the past year, including virtual well-being forums for students, faculty, and staff, continued its podcast focused on well-being hosted by the Associate Vice Provost Wendelin Slusser, who leads the Semel Healthy Campus Initiative Center at UCLA, and co-sponsored Basic Needs fresh food distribution events to serve students, faculty, staff and community members.
In alignment with Earth Day during U.S. Health Promoting Campuses Week, institutions from across the country will share their successes incorporating health promotion values and principles into the work they do every day providing transformative education, generating and sharing research findings, and testing and modeling approaches to improve the health and well-being of all Americans.
More information can be found about this international movement on the USHPCN website or the broader global network on the International Health Promoting Campuses Network website.
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About the U.S. Health Promoting Campuses Network
Initiated on January 15, 2020, the purpose of the U.S. Health Promoting Campuses Network (USHPCN) is to facilitate, advance, and promote the adoption of the Okanagan Charter: An International Charter for Health Promoting Universities & Colleges for U.S. colleges and universities. As of today, there are 320 institutional members of the U.S. Health Promoting Network. Of those institutions, 38 have adopted the Okanagan Charter. For more information about the adoption process, please visit Module 3 of the USHPCN Onboarding page.
About the Okanagan Charter
The Okanagan Charter was an outcome of the 2015 International Conference on Health Promoting Universities and Colleges held on the Okanagan Campus of the University of British Columbia. Developed by 380 researchers, practitioners, administrators, students, and more, it was later introduced in the United States, with the first U.S. university adopting the charter in 2020.
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