As schools and institutions across the country recognized Mental Health Week last week, Enver Creek Secondary was buzzing with activity as students and community partners came together for the school\u2019s third annual Wellness Fair.<\/p>\n
The brainchild of school counsellor Kelly Janda, the Wellness Fair was created to raise student awareness of the many community resources available to support mental health, wellness, community safety and more.<\/p>\n
According to Janda, the idea for the fair came to her shortly after she arrived at Enver Creek three years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur school is located in a very residential area, so there aren\u2019t necessarily a lot of community hubs or centres within walking distance,\u201d she recalled. \u201cSo the thought was, \u2018Why don\u2019t we bring our community partners in so that our students can make those community connections?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
This year’s fair saw 26 community partners take part, including the City of Surrey, Surrey Police Service, Crime Stoppers, FamilySmart and Emotions BC. The event also expanded to include schoolwide workshops for all classes, with presentations being held on topics such as online safety, substances use awareness and healthy relationships.<\/p>\n
Lauryn Rees, Programs Coordinator with Emotions BC, said events like the Enver Creek Wellness Fair are a great opportunity to reduce barriers. While the organization strives to be as low-barrier as possible, there\u2019s still the awareness factor, which is why the fair is so important.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s always people that need help processing certain emotions, but they just might not know where to start, so that\u2019s what we\u2019re here to do,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
A 2020 graduate of \u00c9cole Salish Secondary, Rees said she has seen a steady increase in schools working to raise awareness and remove stigma around discussions of mental health and wellness among youth.
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\u00a0\u201cWhen I was in high school emotions weren\u2019t really talked about, but we\u2019ve seen so much progress made in recent years to have events like this and it\u2019s just really cool to see it being normalized,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As schools and institutions across the country recognized Mental Health Week last week, Enver Creek Secondary was buzzing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672472,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194299],"tags":[49,48,87674],"class_list":["post-672471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-surrey","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-surrey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}