Teaching well-being while raising money

Gordon Wilson, a Senior House Parent at the “Leman” boarding house, is sharing how the Boarding Team is teaching well-being and exercising while raising money for a good cause.

At Collège du Léman, we have a strong focus on the Wellbeing and Growth of our Boarding Students. We not only have the responsibility for their safety, care and academics but also feel that they should be growing into the model citizens of the world.

While our daily interactions with the students help to mould their morals and values, we also feel they should have an education on their Wellbeing. We promote the students to assess and reflect on themselves and challenge their concepts on what it means to be well.

We are continuing our Wellbeing Programme from last year which has five pillars of focus: Healthy Body and Minds, Protecting against Bullying and Respecting Diversity, Building Positive Friendships, Making Safe Choices and Online Safety.

Within each pillar, there will be topics covered and also an Individual and Community Project that the students will take part in. The topics for Pillar 1 were Sleeping, Nutrition, Exercise and Emotional Regulation.

Each of the boys in the “Leman” boarding house successfully completed an individual project linked to one of these topics. In addition, we collaboratively completed our Community Project.

This works out at an additional 16km for each person. These steps had to be over and above the student’s normal daily steps.

We also added an external community element to this by linking with a local Cancer Charity ESCA who did a similar event in which they challenged supporters to walk 55,000,000 steps, the equivalent to going around the world.

We are very proud that the students of Léman came together to complete the project and everyone took responsibility for their part. This demonstrated to the students that it is relatively simple and easy to add exercise to their lives.

With the modern smartwatches and phones we own, we can track our footsteps. By looking at the students yearly average, we were then able to compare that against their weekly average to ensure they had increased. We also pushed the students to get out into the fresh air at additional times than they would normally. Having a cause to do this for helped to motivate them.

Linking with a local Charity helps us broaden our positive impact into the local community. By raising awareness of ESCA and also raising some money we are demonstrating the impact the students can have on a larger scale. As we end our Wellbeing Pillar, we would be most grateful if you would also consider donating to our cause.