GlobeMed at UC
2015 - 2016
GlobeMed Leadership Institute 2015
Before the beginning of the 2015 - 2016 school year, I had the chance to travel once more to Evanston, Illinois, to attend the 2015 GlobeMed Leadership Institute. Organized for the benefit of GlobeMed Co-Presidents and ghU Coordinators from across the country, LI was an extremely beneficial opportunity to learn a great deal and connect once more with some amazing student leaders. Representing our chapter's global health U committee as the Director of Advocacy for the upcoming year, I had the great fortune to participate in a number of engaging discussions, hear from some really fantastic speakers, and get a better sense of not only GlobeMed as an international network, but also how I might bring back some of the key tenets of the organization to the work that I would be doing in the coming year. In addition, through discussions and student-led breakout sessions, I was able to collect a great many wonderful ideas as to possible events and topics for discussion that other chapters had found success with in the past.
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This delegate preparation packet includes some of the pre-reading that was used as a framework for discussion during the Leadership Institute.
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Throughout the three-day conference, I found myself being challenged to push the envelope on engaging important topics and considering my role as a leader within my local chapter. I learned about the strong relevance and importance of integrating conversations of social justice with any public health work, and about the need for diversity and inclusion in all groups and organizations. The Leadership Institute also afforded me the opportunity to discuss and share my ideas for what has worked at the University of Cincinnati chapter, as well as to learn from other GlobeMed leaders from across the country about how they have made their chapters strong and their ghU lessons interesting, probing, and relevant to members. In particular, I formed a bond with three students from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Sam, Harris, and Alexis were great to meet and learn from, and I am glad to now call them friends. Meeting them and realizing all the commonalities that we shared, even across great distance, reminded me of the strong bond that holds networks like GlobeMed together. Though it can sometimes feel, when doing public health advocacy or outreach, that you voice is crying out alone, the strength of the bond between GlobeMed members from across the country reminds you that others are joining your call.
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Director of Advocacy
For the 2015-2016 school year, I joined GlobeMed at UC's Executive Board as the Director of Advocacy for our chapter. In my role, I worked closely with fellow GlobeMedders Bhargav Vemuri and Jayla Burton -- who served as the Directors of Internal and External ghU, respectively -- to create tailored programming for students in GlobeMed to become more aware of important public health and global health equity issues, and organized advocacy events to help spread this information to the rest of UC's campus and the surrounding community. Collectively, we made a special effort to correlate and integrate the material that students were learning in internal ghU lessons with the advocacy events that they were engaging in, so as to produce better-informed, more passionate events that were more able to effectively spread the global health message. Throughout the year, the ghU / Advocacy committee which we headed was able to educate our chapter members, spark meaningful discussion, inform the community, and draw much-needed attention to some of the most pressing issues that our partner, our country, and our world face today.
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August 2015
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September 2015
Childhood Obesity Awareness Month
During the month of September and into early October, GlobeMed's advocacy efforts were focused on bringing more awareness to the related issues of childhood obesity and malnutrition. As part of our campaign to shed light on these important phenomena in the world of global health, we presented powerpoints and fostered discussion within our chapter, as well as organized advocacy and service events on our campus and in the larger community.
Another way in which we helped to advocate for childhood obesity was by bringing in an expert on the subject. Dr. Robert Siegel, MD, is a physician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital that works with the HealthWorks! Program to combat childhood obesity in one of the premier and pioneering programs that addresses this concern in over 500 patients annually. When he came in to talk to us, Dr. Siegel presented a very unique perspective on the childhood obesity epidemic. In many ways, his talk was medically focused, with the kind of charts, research papers, and case studies that one would expect in a physician's overview of a topic. At the same time, though, Dr. Siegel focused heavily on the social and economic factors that play a strong role in increased childhood obesity. The themes that we talked about during our presentation as a chapter were some of the same themes that Dr. Siegel highlighted when illustrating his experience with childhood obesity in the clinic and in the community. Limited access to nutritious and healthy food in "food deserts", a lack of green space in which to stay active and healthy, unsafe neighborhoods, and engineered high caloric and sugar-heavy foods like those identified in Fed Up all play their part in creating obesity. Dr. Siegel also mentioned, though, that personal choice also held great impact when it comes to remaining fit. With children spending more and more time in front of a screen, Dr. Siegel and his team believe it is important to encourage fun exercise and outside time as a means to combat childhood obesity. Indeed, as he concluded his talk, Dr. Siegel mentioned that this is exactly when his HealthWorks! Program has aimed to do as they look to fight childhood obesity not only on the patient level, but on a more broad community level.
October 2015
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To build off of the momentum of this campaign, our organization looked to talk individually to students about mental health and about how to reduce the stigma associated with it. To do so, we set up a chalkboard on MainStreet, where students were able to fill in the blank to the question:
My _______ is affected by mental illness...
Students were also given the opportunity to take the pledge to Stomp Out Stigma by agreeing to implement the following steps in their daily lives on campus:
1. Use "person-first" language to describe those who are affected by mental illness. No one is a "mentally-ill person", they just happen to be a person with a mental illness. One attribute does not a person make. 2. Be a friend to those who need it. Asking someone about their day can go a long way. 3. Take advantage of the Counseling and Psychological Services Office on campus. The office offers five free counseling sessions for any student's mental health concerns each semester. |
November 2015
Malnutrition Awareness Day
Our earlier discussion of childhood obesity was paired with the very similar topic of malnutrition in November. Colloquially, we understand malnutrition to be a "lack of food". In the technical sense, however, malnutrition is a term used to describe inadequate, poor, or unhealthy nutrition more broadly. The World Food Program highlights that "even if people get enough to eat, they will become malnourished if the food they eat does not provide the proper amounts of micronutrients - vitamins and minerals - to meet daily nutritional requirements." In light of this, many doctors have even classified obesity as a form of malnutrition in some cases. Though resulting in opposite effects, obesity and the malnutrition we picture as starvation have many of the same risk factors and root causes. Poverty, lack of education, and minimal access to healthy food and good healthcare services are all relevant to both conditions. As such, the two are inextricably tied. For this reason, we decided to engage in the same kind of in-chapter discussion on malnutrition -- drawing parallels between our earlier discussion on childhood obesity. From the chapter, we then took what we learned to the campus community with a Malnutrition Awareness Day that featured on-campus and social media efforts.
On campus, our GlobeMed members engaged with fellow University of Cincinnati students by showing the impact of poverty on nutrition in a very demonstrable way. With nearly one third of the global population living on less that $2 per day, food is not always the luxury that we take for granted. Indeed, with only $2 to spend each day not only on food, but on housing, water, sanitation, education, etc., it can often be extremely difficult for people here at home and around the world to have enough funding to buy nutritious food. To put this difficulty in perspective, we created real-world graphs that demonstrate how little $2 a day might buy. The average American spends roughly $21 on food each day, so having only $2 to spend instead of $21 would mean eating only 1/10th the food. When this is demonstrated physically by slicing off 1/10th of a pizza or 1/10th of a banana, the impact becomes very noticeable, and very impactful. Showing students walking by the disparity in food access because of wealth helped draw them to our table, where they then engaged in conversation about malnutrition. Using the knowledge built in ghU sessions, we were thus able to increase awareness of the reality and importance of malnutrition among the student body.
Another way in which we highlighted malnutrition on Malnutrition Awareness Day as GlobeMed members was by engaging in a "challenge". In order to better understand the struggles of those with limited access to food, our members lived off of $5 for the 24 hrs of Malnutrition Awareness Day -- which is more than double the $2 that 2.2 billion people have daily. Members were also asked to reflect on their experiences as they went through the day on social media. This helped spread the message of the awareness-building campaign much farther than a simple table on MainStreet might have. Indeed, students from across the university that were connected to GlobeMed members on social media were asking even a few weeks after the day about what had happened and what GlobeMed was all about. The success of the social media campaign was actually really encouraging, not only because of the great experiences that our members got out of it, but also because of the impact and reach it gave to our organization. In the future, the use of social media will definitely be a focal point in any advocacy or external ghU work that we do.
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December 2015
World AIDS Day
Our approach to spreading the message of World AIDS Day was multifaceted. Our first approach was the kind of "guerrilla" advocacy that I learned about earlier at LI this year. To reach a number of students at the same time -- most of whom we might not otherwise reach -- we decided to use campus's largest lecture hall as a place to spark the conversation about HIV/AIDS. To showcase how prevalent HIV/AIDS is in Thailand, we decorated in red a proportional number of chairs in the auditorium as would be HIV positive. This gave real impact to the reality of the disease, as individuals in classes held in the lecture hall sat in and/or next to the decorated seats. The intended effect is that students realize that anyone could have HIV/AIDS, and that it is so common in some parts of the world that a quarter of the seats could be decorated in red. The slide below was shown at the beginning of all classes on December 2nd to help with this effort.
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GlobeMed's focus for the month of December was HIV/AIDS awareness, with specific attention paid to World AIDS Day on December 2nd. HIV/AIDS is a prominent problem globally, although incidence rates have dropped in many places since the epidemic first broke out. The infection, though, is especially relevant to our local community in Cincinnati, and to our partner Social Action for Women along the Thai/Burma border. Here in Cincinnati, intravenous drug use has skyrocketed in the last 10 years, leading to increased sharing of needles and higher rates of HIV as a result. In Mae Sot, rates are similarly high. Dr. Htin Zaw, the Chief Medical Officer of Social Action for Women, has worked tirelessly in this community to lower HIV infection rates, and was awarded the Red Ribbon Award for his efforts to assist the migrant Burmese populations in this area combat this infection. Given this relevancy to our connected communities, students at GlobeMed at UC were especially motivated to partake in advocacy and awareness efforts around HIV/AIDS.
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Another step that we took to increase awareness about AIDS and advocate for its fair treatment was by screening the movie Dallas Buyer's Club. This film, which chronicles the struggles of a young Texan recently diagnosed with HIV who tries to make the most of his situation and overcomes his initial prejudices, is an award-winning depiction of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Dallas Buyer's Club provided a great deal of insight into the impact of the virus physically and psychologically, and showed how some individuals struggle against oppression, discrimination, self-doubt, and their own bodies as they fight for survival.
Finally, GlobeMed at UC decided to take action steps by teaming up with other groups on campus to help limit the spread of infection. As seen in the above video, GlobeMed joined Planned Parenthood and the Sociology Student Association in passing out free condoms on World AIDS Day to promote safe sex and thus limit the spread of HIV. As students picked up their free condoms, they contributed to the symbolical disappearance of HIV/AIDS. Moreover, students were directed into the Tangeman University Center as they left, where they could receive a free HIV test to know their status. Together, these efforts helped raise awareness about HIV/AIDS on this important day, but also helped to actively fight against this disease. |
February 2016
Human Trafficking
One of our major focuses for the month of February was human trafficking. Normally, human trafficking is a concern that we imagine happens only in impoverished developing nations, where vulnerable groups are taken advantage of. While this is definitely the case -- and is a very important dilemma to address -- our ghU lesson this month showcased to us that human trafficking happens often very close to home. For the chapter meeting in which we discussed this topic, we watched a TEDx video from the TEDxDayton conference in which a victim of human trafficking described their struggle and raised a call to action for us all. This was a very eye-opening video to watch, as Dayton is only an hour's drive from our University, and many students who are GlobeMed members actually grew up in or around the city. To think that trafficking can occur in universities and in the communities we know makes it that much more important to be informed about this issue.
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