About Us

Put students at the center of our work, using participatory approaches to engage and amplify their voices.

• Involve students in all steps of our processes, from assessing needs and collecting data to creating, implementing, and evaluating our programs and services.
• Identify student strengths and competencies rather than problems and deficits.
• Consider the whole student, their intersecting identities, and how their cultural filters shape their understanding and quest for health and well-being.

Define Meliora through the lens of student flourishing.  

• Help students develop the skills of awareness, mindfulness, resilience, equanimity, acceptance, and self-compassion.
• Emphasize community-oriented and compassion-centered care, rather than assuming students have the individual resources necessary for self-care.
• Create opportunities for students to experience connectedness, belonging, and purpose.

Prioritize evidence-informed interventions, utilizing UR specific and national data, published research, and best practices.

• Take part in ongoing data collection through quantitative and qualitative measures to best understand the needs of our students.
• Disaggregate data sets whenever possible to recognize the various socio-ecological factors which impact access and outcome for individuals with marginalized identities.
• Engage in continuing exploration of current research and best practices.

Be collaborative, with the understanding that this work is far greater than our individual reach.

• Recognize that cultivating a culture of well-being will be most successful with intentional collaboration.
• Continually develop and foster cross-sector partnerships with campus colleagues, key stakeholders, and community organizations.
• Partner with others to jointly plan, coordinate efforts, share information and lessons learned, create a shared vision, and identify new and innovative ways to embed well-being into university systems and settings.

Use settings and whole-system approaches to embed well-being into campus culture.

• Investigate how various settings (classrooms, residence halls, student spaces) and systems (policies, social norms, allocation of resources) either help or hinder student flourishing.
• Move beyond individual level interventions to achieve population and systems level change.
• Commit to a comprehensive, inclusive, and progressive wellness model of college health promotion.