Surgeon General Murthy at 2024 Wellness in Schools Symposium September 15, 2024 by Taylor Walsh This year’s “Harkin on Wellness” symposium, focused on ensuring that schools employ all proven and effective measures to counter the mental health crisis. US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy MD We co-produced this annual 2024 Harkin Institute convening, which was led off by an inspiration keynote by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy MD, who reaffirmed his focus on child and adolescent health. Later in the day, Kathleen Ethier PhD, director of CDC’s Division of Adolescent School Health presented on her work supporting mental health options for schools. The day’s discussion brought together an interdisciplinary group of panelists whose diverse perspectives considered the question of what schools can do to support kids’ wellbeing and to offset metal duress, anxiety and stress. Blending insights from the garden to mental health policy and research, a unique day. From left: Laura Bakosh, Inner Explorer; Nancy Easton, Wellness in the Schools; Priya Cook, Children & Nature Network; Gerta Bardoshi, Scanlan Center for School Mental Health at Iowa; Kaitlyn Scheuerman, Waukee Iowa schools garden coordinator; and Bengu Erguner-Tekinalp, Drake University. And as with each symposium, the Harkin team invited 12 innovative schools and districts from around the country to receive special recognition for their work. Read the full summary report here.
“Harkin on Wellness” Agenda and Speakers Announced March 14, 2024 by Taylor Walsh April 3, 2024 Parents Hall, Olmsted Center at Drake University The Harkin Institute has announced the agenda and speakers for the April 3, 2024 “Harkin on Wellness” symposium, for which WholeHealthED has played a lead role in developing content and the core theme of the symposium, “Wellbeing in Schools” (the Agenda is below). Registration and the link to the YouTube live-stream on April 3 are available here. This unique and compelling gathering brings together educators, public health policy leaders, and healthcare professionals devoted to children’s wellbeing to consider the full range of proven and available measures that schools might deploy now during this period of persistent mental duress, including potential new kinds of collaboration. National public health policy and program leadership The preventive and health promoting outcomes of whole health learning activities at school The in-school engagement that healthcare and mental health organizations have begun to address mental duress Leading school-based practitioners — gardens, teaching kitchens, mindfulness, PE, and environmental ed — whose outcomes have shown favorable health and wellbeing qualities The presentations and panel discussions continue the unique cross-cutting conversations during the June 22, 2023 webinar we co-produced with the Harkin Institute, “First Line of Defense: Confronting the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis through Interdisciplinary Whole Child Actions.” (See our summary, with links to videos, here.) As part of its annual program, the “Harkin on Wellness” team has selected 12 schools and districts from around the country, whose work highlights the positive whole child outcomes students (and faculty) have experienced through participation in these usually “nice-to-have” school activities. Celebrating these on-the-school ground programs is the centerpiece of the symposium. The Agenda as of March 14. 2024:
WholeHealthED, Harkin Institute to highlight “Wellbeing in Schools” December 26, 2023 by Taylor Walsh WholeHealthED has been invited to co-develop the program for Harkin Institute’s 2024 “Harkin on Wellness” symposium, to be held live next Spring at Drake University in Des Moines. Sen. Tom Harkin The symposium will follow up last June’s successfully co-produced virtual symposium “First Line of Defense: Confronting the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis Through Interdisciplinary Whole Child Actions in K-12.” This was a first time for leading national practitioners and specialists and educators in whole health learning practices to brief leaders in pediatric, child and mental health and school health organizations on the growing benefits of gardens and mindfulness in K-12, including offsetting the mental duress plaguing adolescents today. A summary is here. The focus of the 2024 Symposium — Wellbeing in Schools — builds on the “Harkin on Wellness” symposium’s historic focus on critical community food issues – access, quality, nutrition, and policy. The 2024 event focuses on activities like the school garden and teaching kitchen that engage kids directly in the food ecosystem from the ground up, and extends that learning experience to time in nature, sustainability, mindful practices, and physical activities that are part of the Whole Health Learning framework. As in previous years, the 2024 HOW will highlight 10 projects from around the country, through nominations from educators and specialists experienced in the fields. These invited leaders will travel to Des Moines to meet with attendees and describe their experiences in focused breakouts. The symposium also includes two keynote speakers and two discussion panels that will explore the primary themes: Roles pediatric and healthcare organizations can play, and are playing in schools, to mitigate mental duress and reinforce prevention and health promoting activities The extensive availability of school-based “non-therapeutic” wellbeing-supporting activities like the garden and teaching kitchen The full agenda and speakers will be announced in the coming weeks. Please signup for our email list below and check Facebook and LinkedIn for updates.
WholeHealthED and Kennedy Forum’s Alignment for Progress December 18, 2023 by Taylor Walsh As part of an extraordinary year-long national effort to address the discouraging state of the nation’s mental health the Kennedy Forum has initiated several major collaborations, notably the Alignment for Progress (AFP), a national strategy to move policy to support serious improvement in mental health and substance use programs. AFP numbers many of the nation’s most important health and mental healthcare and policy champions as partners. Along with others WholeHealthED has signed on as a “Commitment Maker” in line with our focus on strengthening children’s wellbeing and resilience during their school years: WholeHealthED commits to developing school models that embed well-established school-based whole health learning activities – in garden, nutrition, mindfulness, cognition bolstering PE and outdoor learning – whose outcomes have been shown to mitigate the impact of stress, ACEs, negative social determinants, and trauma that underlie the child and adolescent mental health crisis, which we argue should raise Wellbeing to peer status with Math and Language Arts as essential for the resilient, well-rounded education children will need to succeed in the 21st century.” (The most current list of organizations participating on several levels is here at the AFP page.) School-Based Mental Health Council As part of the Alignment for Progress, the Kennedy Forum has also established a School-Based Mental Health Council (SBMHC) to focus on child and adolescent mental health. Significantly for this effort the Forum in early December announced a substantial, multi-year grant from Pivotal Ventures, a philanthropy of Melinda French Gates for support of its expansive mental health advocacy and policy initiatives, which includes “a robust schedule of stakeholder working groups focusing on school-based services.” Youth Mental Health Handbook for the Nation’s Governors Earlier this year the Forum also helped the National Governor’s Association develop and distribute Strengthening Youth Mental Health: A Governor’s Playbook The Playbook was developed with New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy who was chair of the NGA during much of 2023, and reflected policy and program elements adopted in New Jersey.
“Ending the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis” August 4, 2023 by Taylor Walsh Speak Our Minds works closely with the nation’s Children’s Hospitals to develop more and more comprehensive ways to give children and young people the means to mitigate and avoid the stresses and anxieties that compromised their wellbeing and which have caused such dire consequences for too many. Its important documentary film, “The Wait to Nowhere” is a compelling contemporary portrait of the challenge that children, their parents, schools, and physicians face every day. The no-holds-barred trailer for the video is here. (Thanks to SOM for contributing an excerpt during our symposium, First Line of Defense: in June 2023.) Speak Our Minds represents a major response by the nation’s pediatric health community to the 2021 declaration of a national emergency for child and adolescent health, and is calling on governors across the United States to pledge their commitment to end the youth mental health crisis. The National Governor’s Association recently issued a Youth Mental Health Playbook, led by New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, current chair of the NGA.
First Line of Defense for Kids’ Mental Health: A Unique Gathering July 1, 2023 by Taylor Walsh On June 22 we co-hosted with the Harkin Institute a virtual symposium that brought together a unique interdisciplinary group of experts in education, mental health, school health, pediatrics, and whole health learning (WHL) domains. The presentations and discussions emphasized the importance of including those school-based, historically “ancillary” fields in the major national policy conversations and initiatives that have been put in place to address the impact of COVID on children’s mental health. The increasing demand for WHL practices like mindfulness, school gardens, and outdoor learning through the COVID era has presented very positive outcomes for children and faculties as they have gradually re-engaged with schools while their purposes and learning have been challenged from many directions. Our conversations considered how providing much more time for students in these programs can act as that “First Line of Defense,” to fend off and mitigate the stresses and anxieties that have worsened so badly at a time of a great shortfall in the availability of school psychologists and counselors. PRESENTATION VIDEOS ON YOUTUBE The persistence of the COVID era has led also to new roles in pediatric and child health care that focus directly on whole health approaches and outcomes which emphasize prevention and health promotion. These trends, early as they are, suggest closer and re-imagined school-to-healthcare connections that are defined not only by interventions for asthma, overweight or behavioral counseling, but also by whole health learning practices that start to bolster children’s mental health, wellbeing and resilience during their years in school. Participating organizations and professionals have been dedicated to improving children’s health and capabilities, but they have rarely, if ever, found themselves in the same room…virtual or otherwise. A sampling for organizations whose team members registered to attend: Speakers include specialists leading and working in the important and interwoven corners of elementary, middle and high school campuses and the important community-based initiatives that support children and schools: Laura Bakosh, co-founder and director, Inner Explorer, a leading provider of mindfulness practices in schools Wayne Jonas, MD, CEO of the HealingWorks Foundation, whole person, integrative healing approaches to reframe community health and wellbeing collaborations Cathy Jordan, PhD, Research Director, Children & Nature Network, leading national movements for greening schoolyards and city spaces Nathan Larson, School Garden Support Organization, a growing nationwide collaboration of highly experienced school garden innovators; also ED, Restorative Places Lawrence Rosen, MD, Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine’s community-based Human Dimension curriculum Jennifer Sacheck, PhD, Chair, Department of Exercise and Nutrition at the Milken School of Public Health at George Washington University Dennis Shirley, EdD, Lynch School of Education, Boston College, Co-author of the seminal 2022 book, “Well-being in the Schools” Kate Tumelty Felice, EdD, Faculty and Coordinator of Education Programs at Rowan College of South Jersey Sean Slade, Education Lead, BTS Spark: (previously coordinator of the CDC’s Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) enterprise) Andrea Falken, PhD, Special Advisor for Infrastructure and Sustainability at the U.S. Dept. of Education; and coordinator, Green Ribbon Schools. The symposium was organized by Adam Shriver, director of the Wellness & Nutrition Program at The Harkin institute and Taylor Walsh, founder and executive director of WholeHealthED. The Harkin Institute for Public Policy & Citizen Engagement is located at Drake University and serves as a venue and catalyst for dynamic non-partisan research, learning, and outreach to promote understanding of the policy issues to which Iowa Senator Tom Harkin devoted his career. The Institute was founded on the premise that good public policy is best achieved when policymakers have access to high quality information, political processes are open and well-understood, and citizens are informed and active participants. Happy Serendipitous 5th Birthday to WholeHealthED! “First Line of Defense” just happened to fall during the same week of June when five years ago we hosted WholeHealthED’s inaugural symposium at Georgetown University. We’re happy to note that among colleagues who joined us virtually in 2023, several in the photo below were there at the beginning. Thanks to everyone who helped kick-start us in DC!