News

Health & Wellness Knowledge Community to meet in Chicago

Chair Jacqueline Hamilton shares why health and wellness matters to NIRSA Members

Jacqueline Hamilton

The first face-to-face meeting of the NIRSA Knowledge Community on Health & Wellness will convene March 13 at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. A Knowledge Community (KC) is similar to a think tank and provides ideas, innovations, and leadership to the NIRSA Board of Directors in “new frontiers” or underdeveloped realms of educational research, programs, and products. Members of the Health & Wellness KC are:

• Chair: Jacqueline Hamilton, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi
• Laurie Betting, University of North Dakota
• Dr. Gerald Fain, Boston University
• Carol Kennedy-Armbruster, Indiana University Bloomington
• Christopher Arterberry, DePaul University

The goals for the first meeting of the Knowledge Community are:

• To review the current status of national health and wellness and its impact on our field.
• To discuss what has precipitated the need for this topic to be a NIRSA Knowledge Community.
• To analyze the information and data collected through the NIRSA national wellness survey about what programs already exist and what barriers have prevented programs in this area.
• To make recommendations to the NIRSA Board of Directors as to what the Association, its members, and campus recreational sports departments should be doing to serve as active participants and resources in improving health and wellness.

Chair Jacqueline Hamilton has been the Recreational Sports Director at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi since 2002. Prior to this she worked at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned a B.S. in Psychology and an M.S. in Kinesiology from the University of Michigan. She has served on numerous NIRSA committees, as State Director, as host for the Facility Institute, and as host for the State Workshop in Texas, and has made the quilt for the NIRSA Foundation fundraiser on occasion. About the Health and Wellness KC, she says:

“NIRSA has a great opportunity on our doorstep to make a positive and significant contribution in health and wellness. We’ve been bombarded by the media with how poor the collective health of our nation is and its high economic impact. The tide is turning away from reactive responses and focusing more on prevention through exercise, nutrition and education. The match to what we do couldn’t get much better. Health and wellness are lifestyles and lifetime pursuits. Our traditional students are often determining their behaviors during this time in their lives. With the changing student demographics and more lifelong learners, we have opportunities to win over these nontraditional students as well as faculty and staff to make lifestyle changes or to maintain good health.

A number of institutions are using Dr. Bill Hettler’s Wellness Wheel as a framework, which illustrates the connectedness among the six components of wellness he identifies. In the recreation field, we likely identify the physical component as our primary focus. The interconnectedness can be readily understood and can also apply to the need for our departments to interact synergistically with other agencies around campus to create an atmosphere of health and wellness.”

Other Knowledge Communities

In addition to the Health & Wellness KC, the NIRSA Board of Directors authorized the creation of two others: Student Learning and Sustainability. The Student Learning KC will meet March 1 at the NIRSA National Center in Corvallis, Oregon. Members of the Student Learning KC are:

• Chair: Dr. Julie Wallace Carr, James Madison University
• Dr. Sarah Hardin, George Williams College
• Alex Accetta, Portland State University
• Dr. Jeanne Steffes, Associate VP of Student Affairs, Syracuse University
• Dr. Larry Roper, VP of Student Affairs, Oregon State University

The Sustainability KC will meet this summer at the NNC. Members of the Sustainability KC are:

• Chair: Pam Su, Sonoma State University
• Rodney Bloom, University of Oregon
• Dennis Corrington, Texas A&M University
• Trudis Heinecke, Director/Long Range Resource Planning, University of California
• Dr. Patrick T. Long, President, American Leisure Academy, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado at Boulder
• Dr. Debra Rowe, President, U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development