Community of Care

The MHTF, now in its third year, continues to provide a productive and collaborative space to discuss, explore, and expand efforts to promote student mental health and wellbeing.  

Our current focus is Cultivating a Community of Care. As a Jesuit, Catholic university, with values including cura personalis and cura apostolica, being a community of deep caring is central to our mission and part of every community member’s roles. 

This year, three committees within the Mental Health Task Force have engaged in action to support the cultivation of a community of care by:

• Disseminating SAFE-ty notices – brief, digestible messages pertaining to wellness, self-care, and help-seeking – to academic department liaisons at the undergraduate and graduate level. Notices this year included focus on topics related to adjusting to college, stress management, and grief and loss. 
• Broadening the reach and utilization of Togetherall (an anonymous peer-to-peer mental health support community available 24/7) and Vector Mental Health Training (an online tool to help students, faculty, staff, and administrators learn to recognize signs of psychological distress in students).
• Posting permanent suicide prevention signage in high-risk areas. 
• Creating a website for the Mental Health Task Force to centralize our aims and increase interdepartmental collaboration and broaden reach of wellness initiatives.