Title: Discover Wellness: A Worksite Health Promotion Program for Oswego County Schools
Author(s) : Elizabeth Keida, Jessica Harris, Barry Friedman
Aligned with its mission and strategies, Universities strive to make positive societal contributions. We describe “Discover Wellness'', a health promotion intervention to improve health behaviors in teachers and staff employees at a middle school in upstate New York. The intervention, a collaborative effort between Health Promotion and Wellness, the School of Business, and the local school system, aims to promote healthy behaviors and decrease rates of chronic disease. Targeting specific behavior change strategies and stress management skills among employees experiencing extraordinary challenges due to COVID and in a community that is severely impacted by high rates of heart disease, stroke, and obesity is essential to improving wellness. Discover Wellness is described with respect to why the university wants to achieve impact, how it plans to achieve impact, and for whom. Lessons learned and impact measurement are addressed.