The Student Health and Wellness program at the University of Connecticut has concluded its Innovate Wellness Challenge for the semester. The first place winners would receive $500 per person along with $1,500 in seed money to bring their idea to life. Second place winners would receive $300 per person and third place winners received $200 per person. Three groups addressed the topic: How can UConn improve the health of both students and the environment in the midst of the climate crisis?
3rd place: Husky Cycle Share Competition
The Husky Cycle Share Competition team was composed of second-semester student Disha Parikh and sixth-semester students Suraj Kalaria and Keshav Desibhatla. Their idea was to host a cycling competition at the Storrs campus. To accomplish this, they planned to incentivise students to participate by awarding them with UConn swag packages based on the amount of miles traveled. They also wanted to use this competition to encourage bike accessibility by partnering with the UConn Recreation Center.
The group was inspired to pursue this project because they wanted to “promote the physical well-being of students, along with reconnecting with nature,” according to Desibhatla. To address the prompt, they argued that the competition would reduce the carbon footprint of UConn students — as opposed to driving or using the campus shuttles — and improve their cardiovascular function and mental health.
Their project would essentially become an extension of the Cycle Share program the Rec Center offers, where students can rent a bike for one day, one week or an entire semester. It also comes with free maintenance, a helmet and bike lock.
To track students and their progress, the group showcased Strava, a free mobile app that can track a variety of physical activities. Strava would provide leaderboards for students to participate in and as they rack up miles, they can submit their routes to Strava in different brackets of difficulty.
2nd place: Tackling Eco-Anxiety through Positivity
The second place winner was the Tackling Eco-Anxiety through Positivity team, which had sixth-semester students Mia Rice and Naiiya Patel and eighth-semester student Colin Piteo. Their project was the creation of the Climate and Mind Network club at UConn. It is “an organization dedicated to helping students through the climate crisis. As an organization, we seek to combat the growing eco-anxiety and stress surrounding global climate change,” according to their description on UConntact.
The club’s creation began through their observations of the current attitude towards climate change for young people. Patel explained that the broad definition of eco-anxiety is “experiencing major ‘negative’ emotions, like worry, guilt, and hopelessness in relation to climate change.” She noted that the usage of the word “major” in this definition has been used by journals to “make it seem like less people suffer from it and debilitate it… Eco-anxiety is definitely something I’ve grappled with,” Piteo said.
An initial meeting of the CMN was held in February as a test-drive for their idea. Piteo stated that about 40 people were in attendance, including both students and faculty. The content of the meeting was going over a few tips on how to help eco-anxiety by Linda Aspey, a British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy member. These strategies included avoiding doom scrolling, practicing self-care and reconnecting with nature.
The future of their club was outlined in the presentation. They explained that for March they would hold a SHaW mental health discussion, where they would have ShaW present on how to deal with mental health stress and connect it back to eco-anxiety. Their plans for April are to hold a field trip to the UConn Spring Valley Student Farm, in order to learn how farms operate along with encouraging students to get involved.
1st place: The Green Garden
The first place winner of the challenge was The Green Garden team, composed of second-semester students Sugita Mahendarkar and Tamara Parks. Their mission was “to combat environmental and social isolation” by creating a community garden and conversational space at the Storrs campus, according to Parks.
Some issues that the pair saw on campus was the lack of community, few accessible green spaces and not being able to give back to the environment. The goal of the community garden is to both improve the student wellness and environment at UConn. Their plan is broken into three segments: conversation benches, art and produce and native plants.
The group conducted street interviews with UConn’s undergraduate student population, and found that they wanted more resources for mental health and climate change, increased greenery, opportunities for climate action and more outdoor social spaces. The Green Garden would address these desires by being “for them, by them,” Parks stated.
The conversational benches would be modeled after the “Chatty Bench” projects found in Britain and Northern Ireland, which were attempts by the communities to combat the isolation and loneliness due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To further encourage students to socialize, the group wanted to have the community garden also as a place to hold public art. They wanted to hold community events where students could create murals, decorate signage for plants and showcase utilitarian and decorative art pieces. “Bonding over public art is beneficial to the community,” Mahendarkar commented.