Our environment
Our social landscape has profoundly shifted. Individuals and organizations are still reeling from the impact of the pandemic, cautiously adjusting their day-to-day lives one way or the other. Further, what felt like chronic uncertainty caused many to reassess what serves best to engage with education, work and communities.
We launched our mental wellness strategy working group in 2019, which turned out to be auspicious timing. As Covid-19 emerged, the College was already in the organizational mindset of prioritizing mental wellness. We explored how to support those reeling from the anxiety and learning challenges of lockdowns, while being acutely aware of the wellbeing of essential staff who remained on-campus for the duration of the pandemic. We had also already been developing options for flexible working hours and new policies to make space for new forms of wellness.
Our steering committee is a deeply-committed cohort of diverse voices that launched our long-term strategy guided by the National Standard for Post-Secondary Student Mental Health and Wellbeing and our sustainable development goals. One year later, that plan was thrown off-course by Covid-19. The group shifted gears fast, rethinking its assumptions and restructuring our response. Some goals fell to the back burner as others were pulled forward.
Wellness as an investment in people-power
These days, most workplaces are governed for workplace safety in the fashion of ‘don’t fall off the ladder’. At NSCC, we go further than preventing accidents.
We build upon a benefits package designed not only to mitigate turbulence in our employees’ lives, but to be proactive in the interest of a stable and fulfilled team with high levels of energy, positivity and health. We continuously look for ways to promote available resources and continue to source new ones for our employees to move through their careers and personal lives with resilience.
When a student is experiencing mental health or financial challenges, we aim to do the same: to promote available resources and innovate new ones. This is how they’ll be most effective during their time at NSCC, which matters deeply to us. A post-secondary institution can only be as effective as its students are engaged. This means building a sense of belonging – an actively caring and supportive community that is welcoming and inclusive of all identities – and participating to forward conversations to reconcile our shared past with our shared future.
As a College, we are the culmination of choices that influence our students’ lives one way or the other. We take our students’ long-term prosperity and self-determination to heart, monitoring our progress from our executive leadership to every last classroom, shop, or lab: are our faculty and students supported, robust and connected with one another? Do they feel empowered to learn, collaborate and co-create as humans? How can we ensure they feel valued beyond their institutional number or tuition amount?
Pre-pandemic, these questions were nice to ask. Now, they’re paramount.
As we embark on the 2022-23 academic year, we’re fine-tuning our environment to map to our sustainability goals spanning our campuses as well as the heart and soul of our employee and student wellbeing.
We’re feeling immense gratitude to our on-the-ground employees who kept coming in through the lockdowns, working extra hard to keep our facilities exceptionally clean and safe. As we swing back to normal operations, we’re excited to pay back that gratitude with this revitalized caretaking of everyone who comes through our doors.