IdeasCity Winston-Salem

This morning I learned about an exciting new project, IdeasCity Winston-Salem:

Wake Forest University, New Museum’s NEW INC in New York City, and more than a dozen local businesses and organizations, are engaging in a unique year-long partnership called “IdeasCity Winston-Salem.”

IdeasCity builds on the premise that art and culture are essential to the future vitality of cities. Winston-Salem joins a global list of cities that have hosted IdeasCity including Athens, Detroit, Istanbul, New Orleans, New York City, São Paulo, Shanghai, Toronto, and most recently Singapore.

Throughout the 2020-21 academic year, community partners will host events to explore creative approaches to improve health and wellbeing, economic development, and justice and equity for members of the Winston-Salem community.

There will be more info about IdeasCity Winston-Salem in the coming weeks and months. It’s really cool that we are running in the same sphere as those other cities named.

Many of you have asked me how we are handling classes with hands-on work, like a science lab, or music or dance. Today we have a new photostory, Experimenting with Labs, that gives you a peek at what we are doing.

We continue to have a really good story to tell on the dashboard. There is a new Campus Health Update there today, plus a great video by Dr. Lucy  D’Agostino McGowan, who explains why symptom tracking is such an important part of our success story. So thank your students for wearing masks, social distancing, washing hands, avoiding crowds, and using SneezeSafe. Those behaviors are game changers in keeping our students here until Thanksgiving.

Along those lines, your Deacs will still be seeing new signs around campus in what is called a social norms campaign. allow me to nerd out for a moment 🙂

My colleagues in the Office of Wellbeing have explained social norms theory to me as follows: people tend to overestimate the degree to which other people engage in high-risk behaviors. When we think more people are doing risky things, it makes us more likely to do risky things too (‘everyone else is doing it, why shouldn’t I?’). So if we correct people’s misperceptions of the prevalence of high-risk behaviors with actual data, it reduces the likelihood that they will participate in that high-risk behavior themselves.

As such, the Office of Wellbeing did a COVID survey in late August, and as you can see below, our students report having very good public health compliance. Your Deacs will be seeing signs about that good behavior – and we hope it will continue to reinforce their own good behavior.

Final thought for today: one key to success is staying outdoors when you can. The weather for the next five days looks just incredible. Encourage your students to take advantage of every inch of this good weather: be outdoors, take a walk to Reynolda Village, dine al fresco, study outdoors, etc. We want to keep riding this wave of success.

— by Betsy Chapman, Ph.D. (’92, MA ’94)