A graphic representation of how the Health Promotion & Wellness vision, mission, core tenants, and foundation all work together.
Vision & Mission
Vision:Empower students with knowledge and skills to create the healthiest life for themselves and their communities.
Mission:Provide high-quality health education and health promotion activities to help students live healthy, well-balanced lives and reach their full academic potential.
Foundation
Personal health literacy is how individuals find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others. Whether they’re just beginning to foster this ability or continuing to strengthen it, practicing health literacy can help students become more comfortable in accessing and navigating systems to further their overall health and well-being both during their time at Lewis & Clark and throughout their lives.
This approach to health education focuses on teaching relevant and practical health skills instead of having students memorize and recite health-related facts. These skills include accessing information, analyzing influences, goal setting, decision-making, interpersonal communication, self-management, and advocacy. Coupled with health literacy skills, students can use these additional skills to make thoughtful and informed health-related decisions throughout their college experience and throughout their lives.
Core Tenants
We apply public health approaches to ensure our education and activities are as practical as possible. We strive to work “upstream” and examine the root causes of health-related issues that students are facing today.
We believe students are the arbiters of their bodies and know what is best for them. We understand that this time (college) for our students involves exploration and self-discovery. Therefore, we seek to provide students with skills, information, and resources to help them engage in behaviors that align with their short and long-term health-related goals.
We encourage student involvement in all efforts to ensure our initiatives are relevant to their lived experiences.
We use a social justice lens to understand how systems of oppression, structures, and policies result in health inequities between different identity groups. We also recognize that people hold many different identities that shape the way they may have access to engage or not in certain behaviors. Finally, we understand that the term ‘healthy,’ when used within the United States, is narrow in scope and is closely associated with behaviors that are unrealistic for most folks due to the structures and systems in place. Therefore, we strive not to perpetuate these systems of oppression when working with or creating educational materials and activities for students.
We acknowledge the traumatic legacy that public health has had with certain communities and that students may have experienced individual trauma before or during their college experience. We strive to integrate this awareness into all aspects of our work to avoid re-traumatization.
We build relationships with campus and community partners to co-create campus policies and practices highlighting student health and wellness.
Health Promotion and Wellness is located in room 110 of Fowler on the Undergraduate Campus. MSC: 182
