If the air looked a little more colorful on Saturday, Sept. 26, around the University of Idaho Student Recreation Center, it was because of the Color Campus Resilient Color Run. Vandal Health Education (VHE) hosted this event as part of the Suicide Prevention Awareness Month.
The run started at 12 p.m. and took students and community members on Paradise Path past the 25 Silver Lot and around Guy Wicks Field while eight different colored powders were thrown at them. Each color is meant to represent a strength from the Sources of Strength program, which is “a reliance program on campus,” as Amanda Ferstead, Assistant Director of Health Promotion for VHE at UI, explained in an interview with The Argonaut.
“Research shows time and time again these eight strengths help us through the tough stuff. They are family support, positive friends, mentors, healthy activities, generosity, spirituality, physical health, and mental health. And on this model, we have a wheel that has colors assigned to each one of those.”
The colors thrown along the run were ones that correlated to each of these strengths on the wheel. First was the yellow station for positive friends, then green for mentors, blue for healthy activities, purple for spirituality, pink for generosity, light blue for physical health, red for mental health and orange for family support.
There was more to the stations on the run than just the color; it was the people who threw it. Ferstead elaborated that “Each one of the stations has a campus resource that does things related to those strengths at them throwing the colored powder. So getting to see faces of campus resources, seeing how many people are available for connection, brings a lot of hope, health, and strength.”
The resources showcased at the stations were fraternity and sorority life for positive friends, Vandal Recovery for mentors, The Associated Students University of Idaho (ASUI) for healthy activities, Peer educators for spirituality, the Dean of Students Office for generosity, Fitness for physical health, The Counseling and Mental Health Center (CMHC) for mental health and Housing and Residence Life for family support.
More than just campus resources showed up, though; students and community members participated in the run, making the event “a good opportunity to kind of meet some other folks, get connected, and a unique way to move their bodies and do something fun,” Liam Quinn, Vandal Health Education Graduate Assistant for VHE, said.
Another student participating in the event, fourth-year Maxine English, who has attended other suicide awareness events, commented on the turnout, saying, “These events show the community because so many people show up, and it’s kinda great.”
After the run, people were encouraged to stay and throw extra colored powder at each other, adding another layer of community building to the event as runners got to be active participants in sharing the colors of strength with each other.
Overall, the event shared resources around the UI campus, brought people together and, importantly, as English put it, “Pretty much bringing awareness to it. Suicide, even though it hasn’t personally impacted me too much, is a big, proponent thing in our society, and I think it’s sometime gets lost in stigmatization.”
As for people looking to learn more about suicide prevention as September wraps up, Ferstead recommends “as many people as possible to take our QPR suicide prevention training.” This training is a Zoom class that’s held throughout the semester that teaches participants to recognize, reach out, and help people struggling with suicide. There are also the Mental Health First Aid courses, which are, as described by Ferstead, “a bit of a wider training where we learn how to recognize and respond to all types of mental health concerns.”
McKinley Forth can be reached at [email protected].