Supporting the Mental Health of Students of Colour & Indigenous Students Webinar

As part of an active student-based health outreach program at the University of Saskatchewan (USask), students identified a need for more mental health and wellbeing supports for international, Indigenous, and historically marginalized students. Using a student-led model that has successfully informed most of the health outreach efforts at USask, funds from the 2021 Collaborations for Change Seed Grant are now being used to support students as they explore ways to provide mental wellbeing support using methods and messaging that resonate with students from these communities. In this webinar, awardees Rita Hanoski and Jocelyn Orb (University of Saskatchewan) share information regarding the need for the program and the opportunities within it from both student and wellness staff perspectives. Despite the early stages of the program, USask peer health volunteers who have already mobilized discuss new programming that meets the goals of the project.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this session, participants will have:

1. Learned how USask has involved students in developing culturally appropriate outreach programming and outlined strategies that could be applied their own setting.

2. Critiqued some of their own well-intended Post-Secondary Institution (PSI) programming and identified steps to make them more culturally relevant.

3. Learned and shared culturally relevant mental health and wellbeing supports for PSIs with one another.

4. Learned some strategies to evaluate similar programming.