Walk & Talk Wellness: The Beauty of Burlington and Your Mental Wellbeing
Sometimes feelings of stress feel like they can ruminate in a particular spot. There were times, over my years at Champlain College, that campus itself had a cloud of stress over it and I needed to just get away to breathe in some fresh air. Fortunately for students, Burlington VT’s Church Street is a short walk or shuttle ride away. However, if that is your only place of escape from the stress of college, it can feel like you aren’t really leaving your stress behind. If you don’t have a car, the case for many students on campus, then you can feel stuck with nowhere to go and no way to escape.
Fortunately for Champlain students Burlington’s landscape is rather unique in that little oases of nature exist within the city. Engaging with natural environments is not only a great way to escape the stress cloud of college; it is also like a wellbeing adrenaline shot. Just being in a natural environment can make people feel more relaxed. Because of this I thought that it would be a good idea to show students some of these locations to act as local retreats for students.
Throughout my Walk and Talk Wellness workshops I utilized walking routes and public transport to capitalize on Burlington’s natural landscape. We met at the Miller Information Commons (Champlain’s library) where we would do an icebreaker to get people comfortable. We would then travel to the chosen location through the chosen method of transportation. While at these locations, I had students utilize a technique called forest bathing, encouraging participants to take ten minutes to be present in our natural environment during a designated period of the workshop. In addition to the travel component of the workshops I aimed to provide information to help them improve their wellbeing and resiliency by discussing different wellbeing topics and coping strategies with each workshop. I tried to pick out topics and coping strategies that would be especially helpful to students. After we spent some time in the location, discussed the items on the itinerary and participated in the forest bathing, we returned to the library for hot chocolate and tea. Following the content portion of the workshop I had students fill out an anonymous feedback form, with a removable final page to put their information for the incentives (the raffle and any extra credit). This provided feedback and responses to the workshops. I also imparted a resource packet (see below) for each workshop which contained resources to utilize the topic and coping strategy from that workshop. The resource packets also provided information on an additional location students could travel to on their own, and how to get there. This information was posted on the library blog on a page dedicated to my event. The link can be found here.
Despite needing an estimated 2-hour commitment to each workshop that happened on a Sunday, attendance averaged around nine people per workshop. In order to pull in attendees I spent a lot of time marketing the event and working to incentivize students. In collaboration with the Outreach & Engagement Librarian Beth Dietrich, I promoted the event on Champlain’s event hub The View, and put up posters (see below) around the school utilizing student engagement. I reached out to the counseling center to see if they would promote my event to students they felt would benefit from it and they agreed. Some teachers even allowed me to promote the workshops directly in their classes. Along with promoting in classes, I contacted teachers, specifically in the Psychology and Core departments to offer their students extra credit for attending the events. In addition, I bribed the students with promises of hot chocolate and tea after every workshop and entry into a raffle. The raffle consisted of some gift cards to some local businesses that had items that aligned with the themes of the workshops, as well as a nice soft blanket.
The workshops occurred bi-weekly during the six weeks we were to carry out our capstone projects. I chose a bi-weekly model in order to provide time to take trial runs of the different locations and give me time to make the supplementary materials. The Spring break provided a unique challenge with the workshops as it occurred during this period of carrying out the workshops. In order to retain interest between the first and second workshop, I made a promotional video for the workshops to be posted on the library’s social media platforms (see video below).
Students responded well to the workshops, rating the activities highly on a likert scale. There was a dip in the second workshop, but this can be explained by the conditions of the second workshop. On the day of this workshop, the temperature dipped and many participants were not dressed for the weather. In addition, the location selected for this workshop was too muddy and we were not able to walk the trails. The other two workshops show very high average ratings of the workshop. The mean score of the overall rating of each workshop is depicted below.
