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Raise money for the Arlington Academy of Hope!

Arlington Academy of Hope (AAH) is dedicated to building a foundation for hope in rural Uganda by providing access to quality education and basic healthcare for children in one of the world's poorest countries. Our primary school in Bumwalukani village enrolls more than 300 students in seven grades providing dedicated teachers, individual attention and a supportive learning atmosphere. In three years, it has become the model school for villages in eastern Uganda. Our clinic built in 2006 provides immunizations and basic healthcare to students, their families and the local community. More than 3,000 patients have been cared for since September 2006. Our secondary education program launched in 2007 provides scholarships to AAH and select local students helping them continue their education and reach for their dreams.

Built through a unique partnership between the local Ugandan community and many everyday Americans, AAH invites you to learn more about our work and join this important effort.

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The Beta Lyceum is an internal group within my fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, that strives to fulfill our pledge of "cultivation of the intellect" by gathering brothers twice per week to discuss current events, controversial issues, and public policy. Secondary and tertiary goals of the Lyceum follow its name's origination in Athens, Greece, as Aristotle's first University. I began this Tuesday/Thursday gathering to allow for an opportunity for brothers (and friends) to come together in a social atmosphere driven by intellectual curiosity and brotherhood rather than a party. Our group has grown to approximately 1/3 of the chapter (about 30 brothers of 100) and generally lasts an hour to an hour and a half. Topics covered recently include Health Care, Taxing, Abortion and the Death Penalty, and The Media's role in government.

These discussions begin with an email outlining several ideas to consider and a list of sources for those interested. Participants circle up rocking chairs and compare proposed solutions, coming eventually to a solution of our very own. This comparative analysis keeps partisanship out of the discussion while provoking thought and building a constituency of well-informed voters. While I am very excited about the group's growth over the last few months, I would like to see it expanded to other groups on campus beginning with other social groups (such as fraternities and sororities), moving then to organizations with more specific goals (Volunteer groups would have much more specific topics than does the current docket).

In order to expand this project, funding for administrative expenses such as research, articles, and reserved seating must be found.

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Power Up Gambia is a unique organization with a specific goal: to provide power to the Sulayman Jungkung General Hospital (SJGH) in the Gambian village of Bwiam. This organization was founded by Kathryn Cunningham as a junior at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2006. While volunteering at the hospital, Kathryn witnessed the hospital staff struggling to serve the local population because of a lack of continuous electricity. After seeing an infant die because an incubator could not be powered, she decided something needed to be done. Upon returning to the United States, Kathryn founded Power Up Gambia with the mission of providing solar panels to this hospital.

As one of four hospitals serving the Gambia, a country with a population of 1.6 million people, rural Sulayman Jungkung General Hospital is vital to providing necessary healthcare to the indigent population of the Gambia. Built in 2003 by the Gambian government, SJGH’s 200 beds serve more than 16,000 patients annually and support a regional population of over 100,000 Gambians in the areas surrounding Bwiam. The treat the main killers in the Gambia: malaria, HIV/AIDs, and diarrhea. SJGH also sends out clinical outreach teams to remote villages, providing healthcare services to patients unable to afford transportation.

From the outside, the hospital looks impressive; the inside, however, leaves much to be desired. Since the largely agrarian population served by the hospital cannot afford expensive medicine, the primary sources of funding for the hospital are the Gambian government and non-Gambian donors. The majority of the hospital’s funding is dependent on foreign aid. While these generous donations have sustained the hospital for a number of years no, they are not sufficient to provide adequate healthcare to patients.

The lack of funding prevents the hospital from running a diesel generator full-time. The generator runs less than 10 hours each day because of the cost of fuel. The inconsistent electricity has drastic effects on the hospital and its ability to treat it patients effectively. For example, diagnosis of malaria is sporadic because it requires placing a blood sample under a microscope that requires electricity. As a result, patients must wait for power in order to obtain potentially life-saving medicine. Furthermore, donated vaccines are often transported hundreds of miles only to be wasted due to a lack of refrigeration. In addition, the water supply is unreliable, causing serious sanitary problems because nurses and doctors cannot wash their hands or scrub in for surgery when the power is off. Moreover, the mortuary cannot be operated without power, which is problematic in a country with high temperatures and high rates of communicable diseases. Finally, the ability to enlarge the hospital or expand its programs is severely limited. Though it was designed as a teaching hospital, SJGH can not fulfill that role without reliable electricity.

The Solution
Power Up Gambia believes that the best solution is solar power, a renewable energy source. A well designed solar power system would provide reliable electric power with lower annual operating costs than the current system. Power Up Gambia recognizes that the upfront capital cost of $300,000 USD for such a system is infinitely beyond the reach of SJGH and the Gambia. The Gambia is a poor nation with a per capita GDP of $320. Each consultation costs $0.06, a high price for most Gambians, but only realizes $80 revenue per month for SJGH. The Gambian government subsidizes other operating costs, but it does not have the budget to power the hospital sufficiently. Power Up Gambia is working with a dependable solar power system provider, GAM-Solar, to design and install solar power for SJGH.

Power Up Gambia is anchored by a twelve member board of directors composed of a diverse group of community leaders and professionals. Honorary board members include Dodou Bammy Jagne, the Gambian Ambassador to the United States, and George Haley, the former United States Ambassador to the Gambia.

Impact
The addition of solar energy will create a two-fold impact:

On the medical level, a consistent energy source will allow:
• Access to clean water for medical staff, via the solar powered water pump.
• Continual operation of electronic apparatus and equipment.
• Improvement of health care services offered to the community.
• Increased operational efficiency of the hospital

On the community level, the implementation of the solar system will:
• Provide employment to the community to operate and maintain the system.
• Use a local contractor, infusing capital into the local economy.
• Provide clean water to the village.

Furthermore, Power Up Gambia is making a difference at home in the United States. More than 25 Delaware-area schools participate in the ongoing “Power Up Gambia for Kids” program. The success of Power Up Gambia’s project at SJGH will undoubtedly add value to the education program, allowing students to see the beginning and completion of the project. The purpose of the educational initiative is to enable participating youth to develop an exposure to diverse African culture, to learn the importance of renewable energy, to understand social issues such as global healthcare inequality and poverty, and to take part in development projects.

• Power Up at Hagley Day – This celebration, on April 20th 2008, will be the culmination of Power Up Gambia’s educational initiative where students will showcase the activities they have completed throughout the year and renewable energy experts will present the latest technologies.

• Think-Out-of-the-Box Energy Challenge – Equipped with both the blueprints and the specifications of the hospital, students are challenged to design other renewable energy solutions for the hospital.

• Multi-Canvas Project – Students from all schools are invited to create Gambian inspired canvases which will be sewn together in a quilt-like fashion and sent to the Gambia to decorate the hospital walls.

• Other opportunities – Pen pals, African beading workshops, speakers and recycling activities are also available.

Project Update
Power Up Gambia has raised $140,000 to date. Although well on our way to installing the power system at the hospital, additional funding is required to make this a reality. Every day counts.

More information about Power Up Gambia can be found at: www.powerupgambia.org

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HealthCare Volunteer was started in January 1, 2006 by an American medical student and an American dental student, who realized the need for a free 501 (c) (3) non-profit portal that connects all volunteers and job seekers interested in health related volunteering or work to the right volunteering or employment opportunity. The need for global health care has skyrocketed. HealthCare Volunteer was accessed by thousands of volunteers and job seekers from more than 118 countries in 2006. This site aims to allow any person interested in health related work to volunteer or work anywhere in the world. Due to resource constraints, several national health care organizations rightfully chose not to undertake such a drastic project, and so the opportunity to unite health care volunteers globally remained. It was clear that an independent, 3rd party, non-partisan, non-governmental organization (NGO) unaffiliated with any country or entity needed to be formed to promote health care volunteering and work in a rapidly globalizing world.

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Most of the people that have not seen up close the effects and the changes that Cancer has in peoples lives think that once a person has survived this awful illness they will go on with their lives as they where before. Ignorance.

This is my story in a more detailed way. My girlfriend lived with her mother and younger brother, her father had been killed in Colombia when she was a little girl. They where a common middle class family, her mother worked to sustain the house and pay for most bills and she studied and worked part time to pay for her personal spending and to also help her mother a little bit with the bills. My girlfriend whom I have been dating for the past four years found out that her mother had breast cancer, one of the most common illnesses today in women. She was devastated by the news and feared that her mother would die. All of the sudden she had to make a sacrifice that most 19 year olds do not have to make. She had to drop out of high school and work to sustain her house because her mother could no longer work because of Chemotherapy. These where hard times for us because I was also affected by this since the woman I loved the most was suffering and could not have a normal 19 year old life and therefore I could not either. I promised I was going to help her in every step of the way any way I could, and I did. I took her brother to school many times, I cared for her mother many times when she could not even move from the pain, and even helped with the bills from my paycheck. After struggling with Cancer and all these economical problems, her mother finally survived and was done with Chemotherapy as well as Radiotherapy. I, as you would probably think, thought that the troubles where over and that everything was going to go back to normal, but it did not. Immediately all of the hospital bills started coming in, Carolina (my girlfriend) was exhausted of working and seeing that her life was not going anywhere, and her mother had lost her job since she was unable to work during the Chemo. Somehow nothing had changed, aside from her health everything had actually become worst. They where in an enormous depth that their insurance would not cover and now she had to look for a new job that could make enough to survive and leave for the hospital bills.

This is a real life story to show that the world needs to wake up and realize that it is not enough to donate one Pint of blood in one year; we need to do more. How come there is no organization that would be able to help Carolina and her family through these moments? Carolina and her family never asked for any of this and in the two hard years that they have been through, they have NEVER said “God why us?”

We need an organization that will help those Cancer survivors pay for their hospital bills, their kids studies and give them a chance to get back on their two feet so that they can COMPLETELY survive Cancer! Remember that Cancer can not only kill a person, but also destroy families!

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Consumers collaborate to expose true healthcare prices. I am a fan of free-market solutions to reform our dysfunctional and unsustainable health care system. More competition and consumer-choices will drive down prices, encourage innovation, increase patient care and improve the quality. Unfortunately, consumers do NOT have access to relevant tools that are necessary to help them make informed, cost-effective choices for finding the best value for common health care services. There’s plenty of health care content out there, but no meaningful tools that you can use to lookup costs for routine health care services and ratings on what other consumers think of the provider, so I have decided to start a grass-roots initiative that relies on social networking to help consumers find the best value for routine health care services. The project is called, OutOfPocket.com, and includes a directory of true prices for common health care services based on actual visits by individual consumers. The website invites everyone to contribute, including the insured and insured, by anonymously posting prices they paid for routine health care services (such as MRIs, mammograms, x-rays, CT scans, vaccinations, office visits, dental and vision), along with their personal recommendations on the provider.

This website benefits all consumers without having to wait for legislation to pass, complicated programs to be initiated, or waiting for the country to decide how to reform our health care system. The site was launched last month and everyone is encouraged to participate. If enough consumers participate to share prices – consumers will have created a powerful tool to help make informed healthcare purchasing decisions and everyone benefits by exposing health care prices. Consumers save money by shopping for the best value and eliminating wasteful spending on overpriced services with poor performance. Check out the website, tell your friends about this project, and let me know what you think.

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Mission: SUNY Downstate College of Medicine is located in the heart of Brooklyn, amidst a growing community of number of immigrants and the working poor, both of whom are ineligible to receive health insurance based on our current American system. One of the goals of SUNY Downstate College of Medicine is to train the physicians of tomorrow, who will not only care for under-served populations in our communities, but also take a proactive role towards the improvement of our patients’ general access to healthcare. As such, a group of students at the SUNY Downstate College of Medicine have set out to create a free clinic (the “Brooklyn Free Clinic”) in one of the our country’s poorest neighborhoods with the goal of providing free healthcare to immigrants and other community members who are ineligible to receive Publicly-assisted health insurance (Medicare/Medicaid).

Program description:
Purpose:
Through a collaborative effort, uniting the talents and energy of students of Colleges of Medicine, the College of Nursing, and of the College of Health Related Professions at SUNY Downstate, we aim to improve access to comprehensive health services for those in greatest need. The Brooklyn Free Clinic will strive to augment existing health access programs by expanding coverage/access for the uninsured and networking with other institutions to achieve a more effective health care delivery system. In addition, we will identify issues of concern (What does this mean?) in our target population and work to address them. As the only medical school in the borough of Brooklyn, we feel that it is our duty to reach out to our neighbors in the community to help ensure equitable and just distribution of vital health and preventive services including health education and literacy.

The Brooklyn Free Clinic is currently conducting community outreach and surveys prior to the clinic’s opening,. This will ensure that the health needs of those who are uninsured within the Brooklyn community are addressed in by our Clinic services. Additionally, it will also ensure continuity of care for our patients. To achieve both of these aims, we will consistently generate and administer surveys in our clinic and integrate that information with that from our volunteers into community-based events such as health fairs, thus.facilitating the community’s needs and available services In addititon, we will generate other educational materials about our organization and distribute this information to existing community-based organizations. At the Brooklyn Free Clinic, health literacy programming will be developed in which trained volunteers will lead informational sessions on topics of interest to the community such as nutrition or diabetes.

Implementation:
Change needed to solve the issues: Brooklyn (Kings County, NY) has one of largest populations of uninsured people in the country. Additionally, few healthcare options exist for those adult community members ineligible for publicly assisted health insurance. Furthermore, the options that do exist are often associated with hidden costs and long wait times as well.other obstacles that deter patients from receiving the proper medical attention. We The Brooklyn Free Clinic aspires to overcome these barriers to quality healthcare by providing patients with free primary and preventive care supplemented by a pre-established network of specialists willing to provide acre at at no or little or no charge (SUNY Downstate University Hospital).

The Brooklyn Free Clinic (BFC) will be located at the site of the exisiting Throop Clinic in the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, an outpatient clinic of Downstate’s internal medicine department. The Throop Clinic resides within a free-standing building on, and is one of the major providers of primary care services to Central Brooklyn. The University Hospital of Brooklyn, a private hospital associated with Downstate Medical Center, and located on the grounds of the medical schoolwill be the main sources of patient referrals to the BFC. The Throop Clinic operates by charging uninsured patients on a sliding scale. It is our hope to see patients who cannot afford even the reduced fees and/or medications prescribed via the Throop Clinic. The Brooklyn Free Clinic has already established a working relationship with the Throop Clinic and hopes to continue the relationship as the BFC grows in the coming years. Examples of our relationship include the BFC Medical Director dual position as a current attending physician at the Throop Clinic, as well as the Throop Clinic’s commitment to provide basic overhead to the BFC such as basic clinic supplies.

Our The BFC community outreach subcommittee is currently working closely with community organizations such as places of worship and community centers, to help us reach additional local underserved populations by identifying specific health needs of the community while simultaneously and to spreading awareness about the Clinic BFC and its potential benefits as a community resource. Our goals are to develop trust and confidence in our prospective patient population and to make them aware of the benefits of our offered services, especially preventive care, which may otherwise not be a top priority for individuals without health insurance or have limited access to healthcare.

The strength of the BFC lies in the students training in and emphasis on primary carefor which SUNY Downstate is prides itself. Although current third and fourth-year medical students recieve extensive exposure to primary care through their required rotations, the BFC will offer all third and fourth-year SUNY Downstate medical students the opportunity to care for such a high need risk, low- access populations as we will serve. The directors for both Primary Care (Dr. Miriam Vincent) and Family Practice (Dr. Bourke) have agreed to make it a clinical requirement for each student to serve a minimun of one shift at the BFC. Through this structure, we can ensure a constant supply of medical students to care for the underserved members in our community.