Our team shares a passion for making positive choices and living a healthy lifestyle. As a part of the inaugural Enactus West Virginia University team, we felt that it was important to incorporate this into our campaign. This is where we came up with Create your Wellbeing Adventure, a campaign to educate and bring overall wellness into the community of Grafton, WV.
Why Grafton?
For the past couple semesters, students of Dr. Julia Fraustino at WVU have worked with residents to better their city by doing many different projects stemming from the Benedum-funded Community Branding Initiative. We decided to follow this trend and to continue trying to impact this community in a positive way.
With Grafton being a low-income area, it is important to show residents that they can engage in healthy lifestyles that are realistic for them—especially if those lifestyles take advantage of the area’s array of natural resources. In fact, the CBI #BrandGrafton project identified that one of the core parts of Grafton’s identity is the outdoors. So together with The Adventure Club, we have been working diligently to help plan Grafton’s Earth Day celebration, the first of what we intend to become a yearly event for Northern West Virginia.
Our Purpose
Keeping in mind that West Virginia is the second highest obese state for adults, according to The State of Obesity: Better Policies for a Healthier America, we think that bringing awareness to this issue—and accessible ways to address it— is important. In Grafton, there is great opportunity for outdoor physical activity; it just isn’t being used as much as it could. A city with a rich history and beautiful environment should be taken advantage of and enjoyed. We want to show the community and region that living a healthy lifestyle is not only important but also very doable for them!
The Big Day!
Mark your calendar for April 22, when the first (soon-to-be-annual) Earth Day celebration will take place. A couple sneak peeks: All Aboard Grafton will be hosting a street fair downtown throughout the day. We are planning several events and physical activities for all who are interested. We also want to give attendees the opportunity to learn and take information home from this event that can be used in their everyday lives. We plan to bring in nutritionists and other speakers to help us accomplish this. There will be something for everyone, and a packed itinerary is in the works.
While we are still in the early research and planning stages, our Create your Wellbeing Adventure team is a group with a lot of passion and determination. We are excited to make things happen in this community and to be a part an event that is helping us accomplish our goals as Enactus WVU team members!
We hope you’ll check back in on this blog and our social media to watch our progress, offer encouragement, or even join in on our efforts! Human wellbeing and sustaining our natural environment are efforts that everyone can unite to work on, so we welcome one and all to the effort.
Brittany Dulin, Director of Create your Wellbeing Adventure, is a senior strategic communications major with an emphasis in public relations and a minor in interactive design for media from Parkersburg, W. Va. She is the current vice president of internal relations for WVU’s Chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America. She also interns for a local non-profit, PACE Enterprises. After graduation, she hopes to move out of state and work in an agency setting. In her free time, she enjoys going out with friends, spending time outdoors and going anywhere there will be dogs to pet.
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