by The Cowl Editor on September 26, 2019
Campus
By Alexandra Huzyk ’20
News Staff
Cheryl Granai, coordinator of outreach and prevention, is working with students and other administrators to increase student readership for Student Health 101, recently renamed CampusWell. This company provides relevant, weekly content about wellness and mental health that is specifically tailored to college students.
Granai explains that the company delivers the online magazine through email. Undergraduate students—as well as continuing education and graduate students, faculty, and parents—receive these emails containing updates about the magazine and giveaways being held by CampusWell. At this time, CampusWell can only be sent to student emails, but Granai hopes to expand the reach of this content further in the future.
The company itself offers ways to market content on social media, which Granai hopes to put into practice. “We’re thinking that we’re not reaching enough students, and so we are looking to bring more social media tools into the equation,” says Granai.
She shares that she hopes to advertise on Instagram at least once a week, and on Facebook once a month to maximize the ways in which students use social media. In addition to these social media strategies, Granai also hopes to advertise for CampusWell by printing ads within The Cowl.
Granai says, “The push is to get more visibility of the magazine and to get students more involved. We hope to have students publish their own work, in order to make the content more individualized to Providence College.”
Besides increasing student involvement, Granai also says that she would like to see more faculty incorporate the content created by CampusWell into their curriculum, or encourage it to be used as a resource for students.
As a certified mental health counselor, one of Granai’s roles at the College is to focus on psychoeducation, outreach, and prevention. Part of her focus is to examine what the College is doing to help students cope with prevalent mental health challenges.
“The current generation is very anxious. They’re not in crisis but they are still dealing with anxiety. We’re never going to be able to completely take away that anxiety, so we must teach students how to manage a healthy relationship with it,” shares Granai.
In order to help with these common struggles, Granai hopes that the content provided by CampusWell will help to serve as useful practices that students can implement into their daily lives.
Besides offering tips on how to manage stress and anxiety, Granai hopes that CampusWell will aid in the larger fight to destigmatize the topic of mental health. Granai says, “There’s no difference between a head illness and a bone illness. In both cases, your body is telling you that something is up. So the question becomes: how do we destigmatize mental health, and how do we make it into a conversation instead of a taboo?”
In the future, Granai says to be on the lookout for posters and fliers that will provide information on upcoming events having to do with mental health awareness. Students within various clubs and organizations on campus will also be wearing shirts promoting the events.
If you are a student or faculty member who is interested in learning more about CampusWell, or creating content, contact Cheryl Granai (cgranai@providence.edu) or Morgan Tullar (mtullar@providence.edu).