Fall 2008 - Summer 2009
When people ask me what Project HEALTH is or what it is about, I always struggle to really condense it. But here we go: Project HEALTH works at clinic settings in order to help address the social factors in the lives of patients that impact their health.
As a caseworker, I specifically volunteer for two-hour shifts at the St. Agnes Clinic where I take in patients as clients. I connect them to resources, both public and otherwise, that can help address various needs, such referring clients that struggle with hunger to food pantries and helping them apply to food stamps. I help clients apply for government utility assistance and refer them to the Eutaw Street One-Stop Career Center.
I chose this service-learning site because it was something different and it seemed important. It was about really working with people and affecting their lives for the better. It appealed to me as from the moment I heard what it was about, I realized that Project HEALTH was very much case management, it was social work in a sense, albeit for mostly bio students aiming for med school. I saw Project HEALTH as a good way to get experience in case management. It also appealed to my sense of holism. I am very much into the interaction of biopsychosocial factors and contextualization. (The prefix play is an added bonus for a word dork like me.)
...I learned that life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man's difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole; and that to treat an isolated episode is almost sure to invite blundering.
Jane Addams said this. She is not very famous, and she is the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She is one of the mothers of modern social work. This excerpt from her book, Twenty Years at Hull-House, describes an incident where she told an unemployed man to look for work down at the drainage canal. He tried to explain that he could not work outdoors in the winter, but she said that he should exhaust every possibility before asking for help. He worked at the canal for two days, then died a week later of pneumonia. He left behind two children.
The necessity of careful examination, of active listening, of profound understanding of the complexities of human situations has become almost routine to me. At this point, I honestly believe that if every person is able to adopt what I perceive to be this ideal social worker's perspective, there would be so much less work to be done in the world.
I think the greatest impact Project HEALTH had on me over the past year is that it has guided me to realization that this service is what I want to do. I jokingly accuse high school friends or their new university peers of being members of the "intelligentsia" but beneath that is a true vein of rejection of purely theoretical pursuits. Art no longer seems to be enough. I had considered abandoning social work to do pure sociological research or returning to my writerly base, even maybe trying out the visual arts again, but I have shed those urges and anxieties.
I was never the kid that knew what he wanted, just that he loved dinosaurs. I was an atypical magnet program student, wholly lacking in ambition. With the greatest amount of certainty that I have ever had about anything in terms of my future goals (besides naming my first daughter Persephone), I have a direction I am walking in. The shapes may be vague, but I'm walking.
Being a part of Project HEALTH is also fascinating because it is so young at UMBC. It has changed significantly with each semester, and it just feels completely different this summer of 2009 than it did in fall of 2008. I really feel hands-on and in the midst of this growing grassroots organization. This experience will serve me, I believe, if I ever move from government child welfare agencies into work with non-profits and advocacy groups. Just watching the internal pull and struggle for stabilization is enlightening.
Future Plans
I am currently working on developing a research project on the availability of services for queer youth and the ability of existing services to address specifically queer issues. I have acquired a mentor, the astonishing Dr. Lottes, and am thinking about if I can make my study abroad experience in the spring relevant.
I am also in talks with a gentleman about an internship (at an LGBT youth organization in Baltimore) in the fall. Everyone is telling me doing one with my fall courseload will not work. At times, above all things, I am a contrarian.
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