University campuses are known for having diverse spaces to live, learn, study, eat, and socialize. But what about a “third place”—a designated spot for students to decompress outside of their residence? Maryville University’s remodeled McNally House is designed to offer just that.
The new wellness and engagement hub on the university’s Town and Country campus opened this month with a homey living room, outdoor deck and hammocks, multi-faith prayer room, sensory room, and basic needs community pantry. Students input guided the development of each component.
“Back in April, Maryville University adopted and committed to the Okanagan Charter, which is really saying that we want to embed health and well-being across the institution,” Dean of Student Wellness Oliver Tacto says. “One of our professors, Robyn Wand, and her class decided to do a survey, [which was] basically a needs assessment, on ‘What does space look like on campus to support student well-being?’ … What we learned in the data was that there’s a lot of students, especially our commuters, who are looking for that third space to simply just be.”
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Maryville University is one of 39 educational institutions nationwide to adopt the Okanagan Charter, publicly committing to maintain a sustainable, healthy campus. For McKenna Stolarik, a student ambassador and third-year physical therapy student, the sensory room is a particularly unique place to “recoup and gather your thoughts a lot better” than anywhere else. “I take advantage of the sensory room a lot because, even though I could go to the library or Starbucks… I get very overstimulated very fast,” she says.
The basic needs pantry, also known as the Saints Cabinet, has existed in some capacity for years but recently expanded within the renovated house to offer personal hygiene products, professional clothing, and other necessities, in addition to food. The team managing the pantry is finalizing community partnerships to increase donations.
“A lot of people think that students who go to college can afford basic needs, but a lot of times, if they’re putting all of their financial resources into going to school, they do need a little bit of support in other areas,” says Jennifer Donovan, chief of staff and advisor to the Student Ambassadors of Maryville.
The McNally House is open 9 a.m.–midnight for students to come and go as needed. The only eligibility requirement for using the pantry, which has its own hours posted on social media, is to fill out an anonymous form.
“[The items are] available to really any student because, at the end of the day, we’re all paying bills. We’re all doing what we can to get by,” Stolarik says. “It’s really ending the stigma by putting it in a centralized location and making sure that everybody [has] access to it, especially our commuters.”
More than half of the school’s 9,200 students are online undergraduate and graduate students, according to the latest reported numbers. The new-and-improved McNally House offers a full-time resource hub for students who attend classes on and off campus.
“The McNally House is also going to be the launch pad for community partnerships,” Tacto explains. “Anytime we have a partnership with St. Luke’s, for example, or any nonprofit organizations, McNally House is sort of going to be that physical space where we could do a lot of collaborative work with the local community.”
Anna McCarty, Maryville’s director of community engagement and well-being, hopes that the upgrades encourage deeper connections on campus. “There’s nationwide data that a lot of folks just aren’t feeling like they’re connected or that they belong somewhere,” she says. “What I want is for every student to leave this space feeling like, ‘I can belong here.’”
