SLU Completes First Year of JED Campus Initiative
Saint Louis University has completed year one of SLU’s four-year partnership with the JED Foundation to evaluate and strengthen our mental health, substance misuse, and suicide prevention programs and systems for students.
Through the implementation of the JED Campus Initiative, SLU’s interdisciplinary team has helped lay the groundwork for the University’s JED Strategic Plan over the next three years. Major milestones for year one have included:
September 2022: Forming an interdisciplinary team
October 2022: Launching the Healthy Minds Study
November 2022: Completing the JED self-assessment
February 2023: Completing a visit from JED Campus experts
March-May 2023: Creating a strategic plan and establishing working groups
The JED Strategic Plan supports SLU’s commitment to enhancing the mental health and well-being of every student and is organized around the following areas:
- Developing life skills
- Promoting social connectedness across campuses
- Identifying students at risk
- Increasing help-seeking behavior
- Providing mental health and substance misuse services
- Following crisis management procedures
- Promoting means safety to prevent harm to self or others
“Partnering with the JED Campus Initiative enhances our efforts to co-create modern, evidence-based services for all of our students by applying nationally-recognized best practices in behavioral health and campus wellness,” said JED Campus Task Force member Fred Rottnek, M.D., MAHCM, professor of family and community medicine.
The JED Strategic Plan will be implemented from a lens of equitable implementation, considering students from marginalized populations who may be at increased risk.
"JED is about a strong commitment to building a beloved community for students living in an increasingly atomized and spiritually destitute world,” said SGA President Marquis Govan. “At its core is a sense of radical inclusion and profound care that will be critical to supporting the holistic health of every student and, even more importantly, those who find themselves on the margins.”
Student mental health requires a healthy campus inclusive of faculty and staff who will also be engaged in increasing their own social connectedness. Faculty and staff will be empowered with new tools for meeting students and colleagues where they are with mental health.
SLU’s JED Campus initiative was implemented as an early action step from the Student Well-Being Task Force and is linked to the Provost’s Academic Strategic Plan as part of Strategic Priority No. 3, Advancing Well-Being and Equity.
“We are grateful for the input received from our SLU community and the hard work and dedication of our JED Task Force,” said Eric Anderson, assistant vice president for student well-being.
An overview of the strategic plan can be found on the JED Campus website. In the coming academic year, the newly established JED working groups will be reaching out to various campus stakeholders to fulfill the objectives of the strategic plan. For questions about JED Campus at SLU, email studentwellbeing@slu.edu.