An Ecological Approach to a University Course that Develops Partnerships Impacting Health and Wellness in K-12 Schools and Communities.

Over the past several decades, there has been an increased focus on health promotion as opposed to individual health determinants and disease prevention. Given the association between health and academic success, health promotion is a vastly overlooked lever for establishing effective K-12 schools. Student, organizational, and community well-being are intricately linked, and thus, focusing on any one of these alone will not eliminate achievement gaps and health disparities. We assert that university–community collaboration is instrumental in promoting student and family well-being. Moreover, employing an ecological systems lens to inform partnership and health promotion practices facilitates collective action and magnifies results. In this article, we describe the philosophical and theoretical orientations that guide our teaching, service, and scholarship. We explain how a university undergraduate course that utilizes service-learning has leveraged theory to build university–community collaboration. Using...