First in-person Wellness Week since pandemic proposes strategies, collects community feedback

Wellness at Penn and Penn Wellness Student Coalition jointly hosted Wellness Week during the first week of April. 

Events during the week were held at various campus locations and hosted by leadership from organizations including Penn Violence Prevention, CogWell, the Disabled Coalition, Weingarten Center, Penn Campus Recreation, and various college houses. The series was intended to promote the eight domains of wellness — physical, emotional, social, intellectual, environmental, financial, occupational, and spiritual wellness. 

This year’s Wellness Week — which was the first in-person edition of the event series to occur since the COVID-19 pandemic — was particularly focused on making a statement about the community importance of wellness and demonstrating the hands-on nature of Wellness at Penn, according to College junior and PWSC co-chair Camellia Bùi, who is also a former staffer at The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Events included a session hosted by Weingarten Center about emotional management during exam season, a crocheting workshop with Penn Yarnaholics, suture training with Locust Health Connect and HOSA@Penn, yoga in Rodin College House, and baking with Penn Baking Club. 

The first Wellness Week occurred in 2016 concurrently with the founding of PWSC, according to Bùi.

It occurred “[at a] time when there was a lot of a very serious links of suicides around campus, and so I think there was a larger [University attention] on care and wellness,” Bùi said. “Throughout the year, every student should take care of their wellness, but there should be a designated time of the year … especially close to finals, that reminds everyone of that.”

A wellness summit was held in the middle of the week, allowing for open dialogue discussions to collect student and faculty feedback on the wellness resources provided by Student Health and Counseling for Wellness at Penn to incorporate into the next year. 

“[Students shared] with us what they think about wellness, how they define it, how it impacts their lives, what makes it hard to prioritize wellness … and how [they are] taking care of themselves,” Batsirai Bvunzawabaya, Director of Integrated Care Initiatives at Wellness at Penn, said to the DP. 

According to Bùi, one issue brought up during the wellness summit was the lack of proximity to the Student Health and Counseling offices — which have locations at 3535 Market St and 3624 Market St — from the center of campus.

While the distance of these offices from campus allows students to have more privacy and confidentiality, some students expressed that they would prefer a more local physical space representing wellness and providing on-campus resources.

“I think it was a great discussion with students, just to hear what’s present on their minds and what feels like a role we could play together in making sure that we’re furthering a lot of the work that we’re already doing,” Bvunzawabaya said.

This feedback will also be incorporated into a mental health strategic plan, headed by public health graduate student Steven-John Kounoupis as part of his capstone project for his dual degree program. Currently, the strategic plan is set to be finalized and released in August. 

“The formal project aim statement is to create an immediately actionable and equity-focused strategic plan to improve the effectiveness, connectedness, and sustainability of Penn’s mental wellness support network,” Kounoupis wrote to the DP. 

According to Kounoupis, the program is a direct response to complaints about the failure of campus wellness spaces in recent years. It will be student-led and faculty-guided, involving connections all across the university, including Wellness at Penn, PWSC, and the Undergraduate Assembly.

Bùi also said that in future iterations of Wellness Week, she hopes that the programming will become better publicized and larger in scale in order to impact more students.