The “healthy campus” movement has taken off at universities across the United States. Traditionally, these efforts have focused on students and targeted specific subject areas, such as alcohol use and sexual health. Since 2007, the City University of New York’s Healthy CUNY initiative has been promoting student health by increasing healthy food access, promoting emotional wellbeing, and creating a tobacco-free campus. At the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), we laid the groundwork for the Healthy Campus Initiative (HCI) in 2012 to create a social movement. Our efforts engage the entire campus population of students, staff, and faculty in building health and wellbeing into university culture. Statewide and national efforts, such as the Partnership for a Healthier America’s Healthier Campus Initiative (2014) and the University of California’s Healthy Campus Network (2016), are also taking hold.

What unites these healthy campus efforts is the recognition that universities have the capacity and responsibility not only to conduct education, research, and service, but also to infuse health and wellbeing into campus culture. Of course, this comes with challenges. Senior administrators and faculty at many campuses think devoting scarce academic resources to wellbeing activities is a form of mission drift. Moreover, health and wellbeing initiatives often exist in silos, and programmatic, opt-in types of activities often have difficulty engaging stakeholders and reaching intended audiences.

To combat these and other challenges, some large organizations are beginning to prioritize broader, more collective efforts. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for example, is engaging diverse sectors to foster what it calls “a national Culture of Health,” in which all Americans can live a healthier life. This shift provides an opportunity to rethink traditional health promotion strategies and consider newer, cross-sector, collaborative approaches such as collective impact.

Read the full article about collective impact for campus health and wellbeing at Stanford Social Innovation Review.