Alice! Health Promotion

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Alice! - building a healthy environment that supports student development and achievement.

Mission, Values and Work

Alice! Mission
Recognizing that health is a vital part of learning, Alice! works to create and sustain a healthy campus community in which students can achieve their personal and academic goals.

Alice! Goals
Utilizing the Standards of Practice for Health Promotion in Higher Education, the goals of Alice! are to:

• Enhance the efficiency, usability, accuracy, usage and sustainability of health promotion initiatives
• Develop, implement and evaluate evidence- and theory-based informed health promotion initiatives addressing priority health issues
• Conduct innovative research on health promotion in higher education and convey our results to the world

Alice! Values
We are committed to the following values in the work we do, the services we provide, and our interactions with students and colleagues: Balance, Collaboration, Inclusiveness, Innovation, Integrity, Leadership and Professionalism.

Alice! Work
Alice! Health Promotion seeks to make the campus healthier by connecting students with information and resources, cultivating healthy attitudes and behaviors, and fostering a culture that values and supports a healthy community. 

We believe that health is vital to learning, and we strive to connect our work to the academic mission of Columbia. Our work is guided by the Standards of Practice for Health Promotion in Higher Education, and our role is to:

• Assess the health status of students
• Strategically plan to prevent student health issues at the community level
• Collaborate with our colleagues across the University to improve the health of the campus
• Implement theory- and evidence-based informed health promotion initiatives

What is health promotion?
Health promotion is focused on broad, community-level interventions that help shape the environmental contexts in which people live, learn, love and work. Health promotion includes policy change, advocacy, adjusting built environments and coalition building. Much of the work of health promotion happens “behind the scenes” and involves collecting and analyzing data, setting priorities for interventions, assessing and evaluating the progress of programs and services, meeting with key stakeholders and decision-makers, advocating for policies or structural changes that will help improve the health of the population, and implementing health-enhancing initiatives.

Some of the specific health promotion work that Alice! does includes: conducting assessments of student health attitudes and behaviors; analyzing data to determine where our resources can best be utilized to prevent illness and improve student health and learning; meeting with particular groups of students and the faculty and staff that work with them to determine how to address the health issues most affecting their academic performance, and advocating for policy and programmatic changes that enhance the health of the campus environment.

What is health education?
Health education is one strategy of health promotion and is focused on helping individuals learn and use health-enhancing skills. Health education is often very visible and tangible (i.e., it’s what most health education programs are “known for”), and it may often include educational programs, activities and skill-building group or individual sessions. Health education is part of health promotion, but health promotion is not only health education. Some of the specific health education work that Alice! does includes Go Ask Alice!, a health Q & A Internet resource, Stressbusters, CU Move and trainings. 

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