{"id":120275,"date":"2020-03-06T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-06T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/?p=120275"},"modified":"2022-03-15T15:50:22","modified_gmt":"2022-03-15T21:50:22","slug":"faces-of-uccs-morgan-lavender-teaching-resiliency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/?p=120275","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Resiliency | Morgan Lavender"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In 2018, local leader and healthcare CEO Margaret Sabin approached the Wellness Center at UCCS with a proposition. According to a Colorado Health Institute report in 2018, suicide was the number one cause of death for people ages 10-24, and Sabin wanted to tackle that growing issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enter Morgan Lavender. Freshly admitted to the health promotion master\u2019s program at the Helen and Arthur E. Johnson Beth-El College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Lavender was looking for work on campus. A job at the Rec Center\u2019s front desk caught her eye. She had done desk-type jobs before, and how hard could it really be? But she was shocked to find that she had been rejected for the position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was bummed when I didn\u2019t get the job. I was thinking \u2018what in the world?! I know I\u2019m good at this,’\u201d said Lavender, \u201cbut instead I received a call from Stephanie Hanenberg.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of a desk job, Hanenburg offered Lavender a position as a resiliency programmer. Hanenburg told her they needed someone with a background in psychology and a passion for mental and holistic health and helping students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a dream come true for Lavender. She came to UCCS with a bachelor\u2019s in sport psychology from Florida State University and a bachelor\u2019s in health sciences from the University of South Florida. With goals of being a physical therapist while working on her second bachelor\u2019s, Lavender found herself having conversations with clients who described their non-physical problems getting out of bed in the morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey\u2019d tell me it was so hard to get out of the bed in the morning, but not because of any physical injury they had, but because they were depressed,\u201d said Lavender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This reality stuck with her, and she couldn\u2019t comprehend why there wasn\u2019t a more mind-body and holistic approach to health and medicine in general. The health profession seemed so focused on treating physical maladies that mental health often flies under the radar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her final year working on her second bachelor\u2019s at USF, it came time to start considering graduate programs she\u2019d like to continue her education in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cImmediately after I took the GRE, I sat in my car and googled \u2018health programs,\u2019 found the health promotion master\u2019s at UCCS, called the program advisor right then and there, and that\u2019s how I ended up here,\u201d Lavender explained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the graduate assistant for resilience at the Wellness Center, Lavender oversees programming to instill a better sense of resiliency in the student population at UCCS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe resiliency program has turned into this happiness program,\u201d says Lavender, \u201cand with the happiness program, we\u2019ve created a workbook \u2013 a Happiness Workbook \u2013 that tries to instill healthy coping skills in students by teaching them methods like meditation, mindfulness, practicing forgiveness, optimism, gratitude and more.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The workbook Lavender mentions is utilized by the \u201cHow of Happiness\u201d groups at the Wellness Center, an empowering 8-week group program that seeks to utilize current research on what does (and does not) make people truly and sustainably happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the impact of her work as a graduate assistant on campus, Lavender said: \u201cThis job has helped me grow in so many ways. I had no idea that suicide prevention and action would be one of my passions until I took this opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When asked what\u2019s next for her after her graduation in May, Lavender said, \u201cI just know that I want to continue making an impact. I think my dream would be to work with the community and specifically do mental health programming and eventually do policy work. Although I also love working with individuals and would love to have my own health coaching and yoga practice one day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two days after her interview with us in January, Lavender had the opportunity to speak at the Call to Action event hosted here at UCCS, a community-wide event of over 500 people that raises awareness for suicide prevention. This event is part of the first phase in a five-year plan to lower suicide rates in Colorado Springs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Morgan Lavender, a graduate student in health promotion, is working to build campus resiliency programs. (More)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":138137,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[432,190,105,60],"class_list":["post-120275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all","tag-faces-of-uccs","tag-graduate-school","tag-helen-and-arthur-e-johnson-beth-el-college-of-nursing-and-health-sciences","tag-student-success"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/Morgan-Lavender-Featured.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1mBpJ-vhV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=120275"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138139,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120275\/revisions\/138139"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/138137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=120275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=120275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=120275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}