The University of Regina is one of 14 institutions receiving a Mindful Campuses grant to help improve and enhance mental health and wellness initiatives within campus communities across Canada.
The grant funding, provided by Mindful Employer Canada, totals $2,000 and will be used to enhance one of the U of R’s current mental health seminars launching this year.
The ‘Striving and Thriving’ mental health training program will focus on helping students develop “personal and academic resilience,” as well as aid faculty in developing skills to support themselves, colleagues and students in doing the same.
“It’s really focused on resilience, like overcoming adversity, dealing with failure, situations that are stressors and might set people back,” said U of R mental health advisor Rob McCaffrey.
The Mindful Campuses grant will be added to a previous allotment of $25,000 in funding from the Bell Let’s Talk campaign, which helped the university develop these offerings in the first place.
“One of the major markers of our strategic plan moving forward is the health, safety and wellness of our campus community,” said McCaffrey. “And so, this program really is part of the underpinning of our mental health strategy, to provide opportunities for our campus community to enhance their life skills.”
McCaffrey said the program originally began as a response to the pandemic, and a desire to offer training and support for those at the U of R suddenly dealing with new kinds of stress.
He feels the pandemic isn’t a necessary hinge for the training, however, as it addresses stressors that can happen to anyone, at any time in their lives.
“You’re always going to be accessible to loss or grief or challenges in our lives, and this program will help us provide those life skills to students,” said McCaffrey. “It's really about trying to support our campus community the best we can.”
The additional funding will be used to help facilitate the in-house training and supplement some internal costs, as the program had previously been designed as a virtual seminar due to the pandemic.
McCaffrey said this means including some amenities for an in-person delivery that weren’t previously part of the plan, like printed resources and snacks, as well as increasing capacity to offer it to more people.
“What we're able to do with that [funding] is we can provide a better experience,” said McCaffrey. “But really it's about providing an opportunity for our campus community to get this training under no restrictions.”
The training will be rolled out to the U of R campus soon, and McCaffrey said the additional funding comes at a perfect time.
“Moving forward into our post-COVID environment, this is going to really be a unique roll out for us,” said McCaffrey. “We’re really excited to be moving forward with this program to help students kind of sharpen some of those life skills, so they can continue through their academic journey, bounce back a little better.”
