KU Student Health Services (SHS) is launching a new health campaign tomorrow called “BEak Healthy” aimed at helping students to become aware of the small ways they can make healthier choices. The campaign comes with the addition of a new utility vehicle, which SHS affectionately calls Beakers.
“We wanted a way to go to students because we know that when we have events on campus we are very stationary,” said Heidi Garcia, the wellness manager at Student Health Services. “The utility vehicle, Beakers, allows us to be mobile; wherever on campus we find students we can go to them.”
The idea for the campaign came from the desire to reach out to students and provide the best information and wellness tips.
“We wanted something that we could use a lot of different taglines or messaging with, so we came up with the BEak Healthy,” Garcia said. “We wanted something not only to provide tips and tools about health and wellness, but we also wanted [the campaign] to be something that was very easily recognizable, so it’s consistent.”
According to Garcia, it is important for this campaign to reach students because it is a new way of making information available.
“We are at the forefront. It’s exciting because we have a new way of delivering messages, and we want students to be excited about different things and not always get information the same way,” Garcia said.
The campaign concentrates on six areas of wellness: alcohol, tobacco, other drugs, nutrition and weight management, sexual health, and stress management.
While BEak Healthy is the main campaign, other initiatives have spawned from the SHS’s desire to make wellness a priority for students. Random Acts of Kindness Mondays, Wellness Wednesdays and Condom Sense Fridays are the three main programs beginning this semester.
“BEak Healthy is kind of an umbrella and then we can tag on whatever health message we want to,” Garcia said. “We are leading in this kind of health education and delivery system. This is definitely a program that we will keep building on.”
Each initiative focuses on providing students with tools, as well as information. At each event, SHS wants students to leave with something that will remind them to make safe choices.
They made kits for student use to distribute at events, like first-aid kits and safe sex kits—which contains a condom, instructions on proper condom use, and contact information for the Watkins Health Center and STI testing.
“We know you’re college students, we just want to help you make some healthy choices. They’re just little things that you can do,” Garcia said.
In order to help tailor the campaign to students, the programs will be mostly mobile and direct. SHS also wanted to brand BEak Healthy so that students all over campus would be able to recognize Beakers and his message. To do so they created Beakers, which will be painted KU red and blue and have a yellow beak, along with taglines and a Twitter page, @BEak_Healthy.
“We want to be fun, engaging, interactive so that students want to come up to us, they want to get information that we have, and that it’s in a fun way by using Beakers,” Garcia said.
Because of the broad nature of the campaign, SHS is hoping to expand BEak Healthy and build on the initiatives.
“The possibilities are endless because we have that BEak Healthy umbrella that allows use to attach whatever health message we need to get out,” Garcia said. “We will always be trying to change it up so that there’s new messages and there’s new items, so that students want to still continue to check us out.”
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