History of the TigerWell Initiative

As it was first conceptualized, the TigerWell Initiative built on existing health and well-being efforts at Princeton, drawing on evidence from local assessment to: 

  • Promote and coordinate a proactive, justice-informed approach to well-being across campus. 

  • Cultivate a campus community and individual skills that support well-being across identities. 

  • Offer affirming health and well-being programs and services outside of traditional healthcare settings.

In late 2018, two Outreach Counselors and a Project Manager were hired as the first staff members to the Initiative. Then, in 2019, TigerWell’s first full year, we established eight overarching program goals and developed several key projects: the work of the Outreach Counselors, the Campus Well-being Partnership, the Well-being in Learning Spaces toolkit, the Grants Program, and data and research efforts. Based on what we were hearing from campus partners regarding graduate and international students’ needs, we successfully advocated for the hiring of a third Outreach Counselor, who joined the team in early 2020.   

TigerWell began in 2018 as a University Health Services (UHS)-led initiative intended to engage campus partners in cultivating a campus community that supports student well-being. The TigerWell Initiative was initially made possible by the Elcan Family Fund for Wellness Innovation, a generous, multiple-year gift from the Elcan family to Princeton University. 

As stewards of this gift, the leadership of UHS and of our department at that time (formerly called Health Promotion and Prevention Services, HPPS) set out to build a settings-based health promotion initiative – looking at the environments, systems, processes, policies, etc. on Princeton’s campus and how they could best support student well-being. We had the opportunity to think about where and how we could make the most impact, taking the great work student, staff, and faculty partners already had been doing to promote student well-being and coordinating and uplifting it.  

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More Recent Developments

The TigerWell Initiative continued to grow its reach and facilitate collaboration amongst campus partners over the next several years. In June 2023, the Princeton University strategic framework was updated to include:  

“a commitment to support and promote the mental and physical well-being of students, staff, and faculty so that they have a genuine opportunity to thrive and engage fully with the University’s mission of research, teaching, and service”.

Around that time, the University committed to continuous financial support for TigerWell. Additional generous gifts sustained the Initiative’s operations and allowed for expansion; a fourth Outreach Counselor began in Summer 2023, and a fifth Outreach Counselor began at the start of 2024, helping create the new Counseling and Psychological Services Outreach and Sports Psychology teams. 

In rethinking health promotion at Princeton – including the formerly separate entities of HPPS and the TigerWell Initiative – UHS identified the need for a more recognizable and comprehensive office to reach as many collaborators as possible. Starting in Fall 2023, we worked with Keeling & Associates, LLC (K&A), who facilitated a strategic planning exercise. Input was collected from UHS senior leadership, HPPS and TigerWell staff, student employees, volunteers and grantees, Campus Life leadership, faculty partners, and colleagues at peer institutions. This process helped us identify priorities, opportunities, and challenges that would ground a new mission, vision, set of values and frameworks, goals, and objectives for the department. In Summer into Fall 2024, TigerWell leadership revised and finalized our new strategic plan and department name, the TigerWell: Health Promoting Strategies Office. 

TigerWell in the News