Take the Stairs

The History of Take the Stairs

Take the Stairs is an annual Harvard University wide team-based campaign to facilitate and support health through movement. The month-long campaign is aimed at encouraging participants not only to take the stairs instead of elevators, but challenging individuals to consider how they move throughout the day.

The campaign is open to all of Harvard after many years at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. Take the Stairs is brought to you by EcoOpportunity, Harvard’s Longwood Campus (HLC) Green Team and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health’s WebTeam. Join hundreds of members of the Harvard community who sign up to Take the Stairs as individuals or a team, putting their best foot forward, striving to reach the highest of peaks around the world or cover long distances.

The 2020 year brought a unique set of circumstances, we hope that Take the Stairs can be a mechanism to help bring together the Harvard community during this time of social distancing and encourage healthy movement.

The Spirit of the Campaign

The goal of Take the Stairs has always been to help make Harvard University a healthier community by encouraging participants to increase the quality and quantity of their daily movement.

This year (2020) is a little different as the majority of us are required to navigate through the complications of working from home – from solitude to juggling the lack of childcare – so we are expanding the 2020 Take the Stairs campaign to encourage families to participate as a team as well as teams of colleagues.

Individuals and teams will still strive towards reaching the peak, but prizes are not given for speed. Regardless of pace or other limitations, we encourage teams to make Take the Stairs part of their lifestyle.

Since its inception, Take the Stairs has emphasized health, exercise, energy savings and community building as it relates to the workplace. Stairs are not accessible to all people, nor are they the only method to enhance movement. Having considered years of feedback, the focus of the campaign is the promotion of healthy lifestyles via various physical activities throughout the day. This means that participants may track the physical activity they consider to fit within the campaign’s parameters, across all ranges of physical activities and abilities.

We offer step conversions for activities like walking or biking, but participants are encouraged to track the movements they deem as applicable.

If friendly competition motivates your school, department or family to “take the stairs”, feel free to compete. However, Take the Stairs is designed as a campaign rather than a competition because, as volunteers, we do not have the capacity to address the influx of questions that arise from competitive participants. We will work to incorporate answers to questions into the FAQs and future campaigns, but may not reply to all questions in a timely manner.