It's Mental Health Wellness Day

Today is Mental Health Wellness Day, and faculty, staff and student leaders will be sporting their orange t-shirts as the campus community rallies together to support mental health initiatives and resources for students, faculty and staff.

Mental Health Wellness Day's key messages are as follows:

• 1 in 5 Canadians will be affected by mental illness in their lifetime
• The University of Waterloo is a caring community and is a safe place to ask for help
• We have the resources to help you

To provide additional support to students, Mental Health Wellness has partnered with Good2Talk, a post-secondary student helpline available to Ontario students. Representatives from Good2Talk will be at the Student Life Centre today.

Students, staff and faculty are invited to support Mental Health Wellness Day's main event: “Spin for Mental Health”. To reinforce the value of physical activity, fifteen stationary bikes will be set up in the SLC Great Hall from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. today. Participants can register for a 15-minute session individually or as a team, or they can register for a 50-minute spin class that commences at 4:00 p.m.

Following today's kick-off, eight weeks of mental health promotion activities are available for students to take part in. Visit the 1in5 website for activities, dates and times as the calendar is being updated daily.

 

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Researchers get $2.5M to feed Hungry Cities

This is an excerpt of a piece originally published on the Faculty of Environment's news page.

Environment researchers team-up for The Hungry Cities Partnership—an international research project examining governance, rapid urbanization and urban food security in the Global South.

The project, co-directed by Wilfrid Laurier University researcher Jonathan Crush and the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities director Edgar Pieterse, has been awarded $2.5 million in funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the International Development Research Centre through an International Partnerships for Sustainable Societies (IPaSS) grant.

Members of the research team from the Faculty of Environment include Bruce Frayne, Associate Professor and Director of the International Development program in the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development (SEED); Steffanie Scott, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management and Jennifer Clapp, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability and Trudeau Fellow in the Department of Environment and Resource Studies.

The Hungry Cities project aims to understand how cities in the Global South will manage the food security challenges arising from rapid urbanization and the transformation of urban food systems.

“This is the first project of its kind to examine the question of food and nutrition security in a diversity of rapidly urbanizing cities and regional across the world,” says Frayne. “The Partnership will use the results of our collaborative research from each of the seven partner cities to engage with policy debates and processes at city, national and international levels.”

The research also examines themes of entrepreneurship and growth in the food sectors of major cities, the impact of supermarket supply chains, and youth and women’s employment and entrepreneurship in the informal economy.

Read the rest of the article on the Faculty of Environment's news page.

 

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Request Tracker upgrade, downtime Saturday

by Lisa Tomalty.

The Request Tracker (RT) system, used by many areas of campus, is being upgraded to the most recent version: Request Tracker 4.2 (RT4). As a result, the system will be unavailable from approximately 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. this Saturday, October 25.

This upgrade is a result of the work of the campus wide projects: RT Investigation Project (2012-13) and Request Tracker 4 (RT4) Implementation Project (2013-14).

Non-emergency requests, during the RT down time, may be sent to rt@uwaterloo.ca. They will be queued and submitted to the system when it is back up.

Emergency requests during the RT down time may be sent to IST or the Faculty Service Desks.

What you need to know about RT4

RT4 will be delivering the same service of the current RT system, with an updated look, new request submission forms, and some new features. RT4 for issue solvers will have the same URL as the current system.  RT4 request forms are new and will be available from the Self Service menu (click ‘New Ticket’ to see the forms list). Emails to RT4 will remain the same - rt@uwaterloo.ca.

What’s new in RT4?

• “Reply” and “Comment” buttons (at the top) are now in under “Actions” menu at the top
• Quoted text in the ticket history is hidden by default (for a cleaner look); it can be shown by clicking “-Show quoted text-“

New features you will see over the next few months include:

• A recurring tickets feature (allows creation of multiple recurring tickets based on a schedule)
• The new knowledge base (appears as “Articles” in the top menu)
  

7 years' worth of data will be moved to RT4, and older data will be available on an archived "read only" site.

There are a number of noteworthy default settings:

• Ticket history will display newest items at the top. See the instructions for changing this setting.
• the WYSIWYG editor is turned off by default. See the instructions to turn it on.
  

For an overview of RT4, review the RT4 PDAG seminar from March 28. Further documentation is available on the RT4 site. Training is available and can be requested via the RT Help email.

If you have questions or concerns, please email rt-help@rt.uwaterloo.ca.

 

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Passport Challenge begins; other notes

The Get up and Go Passport Challenge begins today. Register your team, download your passport, consult the Daily Bulletin for a series of clues, and head out to the two sites you think the clues match.

Get a date/time/signature by someone from that area on your passport, and follow the same procedure each working day until the contest ends on October 31. Today's clues are as follows:

• Good “CONTACTS” in this building; they can help improve your “VISION"
• Firefighters gym is located in this faculty

Good luck!

The Get up and Go Passport Challenge has been designed to get the Waterloo community up and moving to various predetermined areas across campus. The objective is to get employees to experience new Waterloo locations, meet new colleagues and enjoy some healthy activity.

A group of staff members has organized "Christian fellowship during the lunch hour" on Thursdays from 12:15 p.m. to 1:20 p.m. in Modern Languages 315. "Come on in, bring your own lunch and let's talk together," writes Gerry Brummelhuis. Contact Brummelhuis for more information.

Conrad Grebel University College has announced a pair of upcoming concerts:

Wednesday, October 22 will feature Contemplation with Natasha Campbell (soprano), Heidi Wall (piano) and Miriam Stewart-Kroeker (cello) performing a selection of modern compositions including Samuel Barber's "Hermit Songs." The concert takes place at 12:30 p.m. in the Conrad Grebel Chapel.

On Friday, October 24, The Attacca Quartet—a world-renowned quartet (pictured at right) hailing from New York—will be playing Haydn starting at 12:30 p.m. in the Conrad Grebel Chapel.

"As part of the Faculty of Science’s United Way fundraising efforts this year, with the help of UW catering, we are having a Poutine Bar," writes Sandra Groen from the Dean of Science's office. "The Poutine Bar will be located just outside of B1(Science CND) between 11:30 am and 1:00 pm. The cost for a Poutine is $5.50 for regular Poutine and $6.00 for Poutine with Sausage. We are having this on Wednesday, October 29. We need to confirm numbers by October 22 so that we have enough Poutine for all. So you can email me with your order for Regular Poutine or Sausage Poutine."

Hush, but don't flush: A late-night water main break outside the Dana Porter Library has been contained, but only limited water services have been restored to the building. The water pressure for flushing the Library's 50+ toilets is not available, so the Library has closed access to all its washrooms. Signs to that effect have been posted at the Library's entrance. There are several nearby buildings with working washrooms available.

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