Dialogue to Action Virtual Conference

The conference will offer 25 workshops featuring best, promising and emerging practices in the sector.

The CICMH Annual Conference is an opportunity for stakeholders in post-secondary mental health across Ontario and Canada to come together, connect over their shared goals, and learn new strategies to bring back to their practice. The event represents the heart of CICMH’s work: bringing together diverse stakeholders among Ontario’s post-secondary staff, students, community organizations, and campus champions so they can collaborate on, and ultimately innovate solutions to, campus mental health problems.

The opening keynote speaker this year is Dr. Carmen Black. Dr. Black is the assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, and Director of the Social Justice and Health Equity curriculum for Yale Psychiatry.

This conference will also feature a keynote panel discussion on Campus/Community Partnerships. It will be an in-depth conversation about how to work together to enhance the mental health resources and services available on campus. The Panel will highlight two campus/community partnerships supported by CICMH’s Campus/Community Partnership Project.

Dialogue is a critical step in the process of shaping change; it allows us to share ideas, work through logic, and problem-solve, together. However, this process brings us nowhere without being followed by action. This year’s conference theme, Dialogue to Action, invites us to engage in that process in its entirety. Not just talking about decolonization but doing it. Not just discussing the whole campus approach but actively participating in it. Throughout the conference, attendees will be encouraged to take initiative, put in the effort, and make moves to bring our collective vision of a healthy campus to reality. In working with this theme, each conference session will feature a call-to-action for participants to consider and join. Through this lens, we will also be exploring topics that embed and examine the social determinants of health.

To facilitate this discussion, dialogue will happen in these five following streams:

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

There is a growing movement for institutional leadership and campus frameworks to implement equity, diversity, and inclusivity-related policies to ensure equitable access to services and programming on campus. Province-wide, there has been a focus on understanding the unique needs of students based on the various intersections of their identity such as culture, race, religion, sexual orientation, and physical or mental health disability. Presentations in this stream will address equity-driven and student-driven programming.

Changing Systems

Presentations in this stream will focus on the overarching systems of mental health provision on campus and how students and staff are challenging and changing those systems through anti-oppressive practices. Presentations in this stream will speak to systemic barriers within this work and strategies for shifting the structure and organization of mental health services on campus through the application of EDI (Equity, Diversity & Inclusion) principles. This includes work around the National Standard for Mental Health and Well-Being for Post-Secondary Students.

Indigenous Student Wellness and Engagement

Presentations in this stream will center around Indigenous world views grounded in holistic understandings and the value of interrelatedness as a model for wellness and engagement of Indigenous student populations. Areas of focus may include: embracing Indigenous worldviews in campus and learning environments; Indigenous pedagogy and educational interconnections.

Student Engagement

Facilitating connection and belonging among students is vital to counter the increasing experiences of isolation and loneliness in the virtual world. The recent shift away from being physically on campus has highlighted a need to devise innovative strategies to allow students to engage with their institution and their peers in a meaningful way. Presentations in this stream will center around innovative initiatives that: create meaningful programming outside of the classroom environment for students; utilize peer-to-peer models to create meaningful relationships among students; emphasize communal spaces for students to address mental health and wellness topics; and feature co-design with students.

Substance Use & Harm Reduction

There has been an increase in substance-related harms throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Presentations in this stream will focus on the use and misuse of drugs, alcohol and other substances by student populations. Example topics might include: trends and patterns in student substance use during the pandemic; harm reduction programming on campus and strategies for reducing substance-related harms.

REGESTRATION FEE: The single registration rate is $50 per person. The student rate is $40 and a group rate is $35 for groups of 10 plus people. The conference platform will also be available to all registered attendees for three months following the conference so you may view all the workshops at your own leisure.