UBC Giving Day for Walk-in Wellness Clinic

How do you take care of your mental wellbeing during the pandemic?

This was the question we asked on Wilden social media channels on UBC Giving Day. Everyone who shared his strategies helped raise over $5,000 for mental health support.

An entire community came together for 24 hours on April 7th to support students in many different ways. It was UBC Giving Day. One of the many causes was the campus Wellness Walk-in Clinic, where students can get immediate mental health support. During the current crisis young people are facing even more mental challenges than before.

Youth mental health is very important to the Blenk Family, the developers of Wilden, Kelowna’s largest master-planned community. In 2017 together with KGH Foundation they founded the Blenk Family Fund for Youth Mental Heath to strengthen the network of mental health support and services available to young people and families. But also beyond the family foundation, Wilden has many ties and running projects with the UBC Okanagan Campus. Getting engaged in Giving Day was a natural thing.

For 24 hours we ran a social media campaign called ‘You Comment – We Donate’. We asked our followers to please share a strategy they learned during the pandemic to improve their mental wellbeing. For every meaningful comment that was shared we donated an extra $50 plus an initial contribution of $1,000. We were blown away by over 100 responses and insightful tips that were posted. They drove our contribution to Walk-in Wellness Clinic up to $6,100.

Here are some of our favourite comments we received. We hope they will inspire you to share snippets of hope with your community, to help us all through these tough times.

Thank you for your support and for making this campaign such a big success for UBC students!