Overview
These mini grants offer opportunities for wellness champions to turn ideas supporting their department’s well-being into reality.
Cycle timeline
- July/August – Applications open
- September/October – Applications due and review period
- November-May – Implementation of mini-grants
FY25 mini grant grantees
Catherine Robertson
The PICU Wellness Committee will host regular “Bonding over Boba” events to help strengthen and develop the social wellness for PICU staff. Collaborating with a local vender to create a monthly Boba Tea Bar on the unit, we are creating a time and space for staff to support each other, build community, and promote wellness as individuals and as a whole.
Nicole Calder
A collaborative initiative where residency leaders come together to create a unique cookbook that reflects their diverse culinary tastes and personal histories, aimed at fostering teamwork, enhancing communication, and building resilience. Through virtual collaborative sessions and an in-person retreat, the project not only produces a meaningful cookbook but also strengthens leadership skills and celebrates cultural diversity within the residency program.
Deza Villanueva
The Chair Yoga Wellness Initiative aims to improve the well-being of the Hem/Onc Admin and Finance Team by offering accessible, low-impact yoga sessions tailored for individuals of all abilities and work environments. This program supports diversity, equity, and inclusion by providing flexible, inclusive wellness options that align with UCSF’s commitment to a supportive and healthy environment.
Rudy Asuncion and Nancy Puckett
The program focuses on improving collaboration across organizational silos while fostering community through diverse wellness initiatives. By integrating various approaches, we aim to enhance teamwork, well-being, and open communication within our Neurology administration and finance staff.
Rashmi Manjunath
Hospitalists are witness to the physical, emotional, and existential suffering of patients, families, and care teams and currently there is no formalized time or space to debrief from these challenges leading to compassion fatigue, frustration, and isolation. In this project, we aim to provide food and space to allow debriefing and community building during clinical care stretches.
Andrea Fuller
Housing Services will put on an optional three-part speaker series to help improve Financial and Career Wellness. Our series will include, Managing Finances, Career Tracks, and Homelessness and The Importance of Affordable Housing.
Heidi Frank
We are seeking wellness mini-grant funds to support a team lunch before a volunteer event at GLIDE, where Institute for Global Health Sciences (IGHS) staff and faculty will serve meals as part of GLIDE’s Daily Free Meals Program. This initiative aligns with our focus on emotional wellness, as volunteering has been shown to reduce stress and boost morale. Our previous volunteer events have been successful in fostering community, enhancing connections across IGHS, and supporting the San Francisco community.
Stuart Gaffney
Keep Moving for Wellness! is an exciting series of fun group activities – yoga, Tai Chi, and pickleball – to learn great new ways to incorporate healthy movement into your day, every day. Whether in the office, at home, or on vacation, we could all use new ideas to make our days more active, healthy, and fun!
Eric Brooks
Office of Communications staff will participate in a volunteer service day followed by a debrief over lunch to discuss learnings, challenges and its impact on our mission as communicators.
Benjamin Perez
The COSI team will enhance diversity and inclusivity through an Origami & Storytelling Competition designed to strengthen team cohesion while encouraging cultural exploration and learning. Each participant will receive a kit with premium origami materials and a cultural booklet, fostering team bonding, celebrating diverse backgrounds, and promoting cultural awareness.
Jessica Marchi
Project Connect's initiatives will combat the feeling of stress, burnout and disconnectedness in the workday with scheduled wellness activities.
Tijana Popovic
The Grant will enhance staff well-being through virtual wellness events, live zoom speaker presentation on communication, a Wellness Bingo Challenge, and three Wellness Roundtable sessions, all aimed at promoting emotional, physical, and social wellness in a supportive and connected workplace.
Niall Kavanagh and Aura DeMare
A UCSF staff beach clean-up in collaboration with Refuse Refuse, focused on team-building and environmental stewardship, followed by a discussion on how we can integrate these values into our work and community.
Maureen Soliman
The Physical Therapy Department at UCSF is experiencing rapid growth in both staff and patient volume; to ensure the health and wellbeing of our team, we are seeking funding to establish a series of wellness events, including art classes, physical activity offerings and career/environmental support, designed to foster a strong, cohesive team, reduce burnout, and enhance job satisfaction. By investing in the wellbeing of our physical therapy professionals, we aim to sustain a high level of care and service to our patients.
Kera Bottoms
The Shared Wellness Room will be a program where staff and family can experience improved levels of wellness and benefit while at the hospital.
Contact
Interested in applying for a wellness champions mini-grant? Connect with the wellness champion in your department or apply to be a wellness champion!
FY24 mini grant grantees
Will Kellogg
After polling our team on which of the pillars of wellness they felt we could learn more about, we implemented a plan to create a program for both faculty & staff, focused on answering questions about financial well-being at UCSF. Attendees were given a copy of the book “I Will Teach You to be Rich”, as well as provided with catering, creating an environment where people from across the department could learn, network, and build community.
Inna Cotur
The purpose of the wellness grant was to raise awareness in healthy eating and well-being at work and outside of work. The wellness committee of the Diagnostic Radiology department partnered up with the UCSF Nutrition and Food Services Department and arranged online presentations about everyday nutrition and healthy eating with the goal of improving at least one of the seven pillars of wellness.
Stuart Gaffney
In our needs assessment, one issue rose to the surface: office clutter and the ongoing "time capsule" of workstations frozen in time the way people left them in March 2020 when COVID lockdowns began. We planned a clutter clearing workshop and identified a highly respected facilitator to help us craft a 3-part activity to meet our needs and address the underpinnings of persistent clutter.
Heidi Frank
In order to foster social connectedness we planned a volunteer event at Project Open Hand and a mini-golf excursion as part of a cross-department retreat.
Lashelle Bolton
As a high-performance department, the Office of Healthcare Compliance & Privacy is a fully remote team that focuses on risk mitigation across all spectrums of the organization.
This project was designed to provide stress relief at the Annual Onsite Team Retreat.
Christina Delsman
This wellness grant focused on bringing activities centered on physical, emotional, and social wellness pillars to the ~500 staff in UCSF Health’s Revenue Cycle. These activities took the form of a Wellness Walk (physical), the purchase of Gratitude Journals and a Gratitude Workshop (emotional) for all staff, and three Virtual Coffee Breaks (social).
Physical, Emotional, and Social Wellness Initiatives for UCSF Health’s Revenue Cycle
Michael Towne
Creating means for staff to move beyond the traumatic experiences of the pandemic via retreat and ongoing art therapy based expressive opportunities.
Belle La
During Recess Breaks, we practice Seven Pillars of Wellness by incorporating physical, social, emotional, financial, environmental, career and spiritual participation. Our Recess Breaks consist of a range of activities, e.g., stretch exercises, scavenger hunts, TedTalks, riddles, team activities, hikes, walks, cooking recipes, competitions, etc. F or FY24, we held an in-person Team cooking class. The in-person Thai cooking class brought a lot of laughter, joy and fun, as well as Team engagement. After the event, staff was inspired to try the recipe at home.
Lisa Klope
To address the pillars of physical and social wellness, we hosted a picnic and low-impact hike for School of Nursing staff members. To make the events accessible to our staff colleagues that live in different parts of the Bay Area, we hosted t wo simultaneous hikes — one in San Francisco and one in the East Bay.
Emily Hylton
For our grant proposal we planned a team building social event. The event was hosted virtually by “Broadway Murder Mysteries”. Our CRNA team met at an event space in Mission Bay where we had appetizers and dinner then we sat d own around the TV for a murder mystery game that was hosted live. At the end of the game we had fun solving the murder mystery after acting all our parts out. The event turned out to be a fun team bonding experience.
Nicole Calder
The DOM Education Office was looking for ways to boost morale and integrate back to some in person activities post-COVID. The Education Office meets regularly in person once a month on Tuesdays. The purpose of this grant was to take four of our twelve in-person sessions and focus on a few of the well-being pillars to further enhance wellbeing and team development.
Kaitlin Clancey-Zazueta
My Code Lavender project is a rapid response psychological aid tool compromised of a Mission Bay Pediatric interprofessional team that aims to support hospital staff members in times of heightened stress. The purpose of Code Lavender is to bring support and a calming response to an individual and team and to help with the emotional processing of a traumatic event. During a crisis, a team (i.e. provider, staff, trainee) member can initiate the alert, either for individual assistance or for their entire team. This practice is essential for hospital staff to nurture each other and provide the space to recuperate from a stressful incident.
Gina Curiel
The UCSF Police Department has over 245 sworn and civilian employees. We run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. With that said, UCPD wanted to create a space that would offer safety, peace, and recharging. I worked with a small committee within the department to make sure that a wide range of wellness needs were being met. We decided to use this year’s grant funds to purchase items that promote physical wellness.
Jessica Marchi
Out of the 7 pillars of wellbeing, the DTR team wanted to strengthen three. The social, emotional and physical pillars were what we chose to focus our programming on. We did this by engaging in multiple social gatherings, participating in a group physical activity and the use of a BINGO game to promote participating in more behaviors that promote wellness.
Nora O'Connel
This grant provided a pop-up wellness retreat for our staff to engage in wellness activities. Once a month, I set up a space with various items for staff to use to take a break throughout the day. There was a survey to capture how people felt before and after using the room.