Project HEALTH Expands to Washington

Seven representatives from the Washington, D.C. branch of Project HEALTH, a Harvard volunteer program focused on pediatric health, met with volunteers from Harvard and Columbia Universities on Wednesday to discuss how to start the community service program at George Washington University (GW) this fall.

Since its founding in 1996 at Harvard, the public health community service program, which unites college volunteers, area hospitals, and surrounding communities through clinic- and community-based programs, has expanded to Providence, New York City, and—this summer—Washington.

During the daylong series of meetings at Boston Medical Center (BMC) and Harvard, the students from GW and Harvard talked with BMC officials and visited participants of the Asthma Swim Program at Madison Park Community Center in Roxbury.

The hospital officials discussed how to gain credibility and support within a medical institution.

BMC Pediatrics Department Chair and Boston University Medical School Professor Barry Zuckerman said that “innovation” and the usefulness of the services distinguished Project HEALTH volunteers as “partners, not candy-stripers.”

Ellen Lawton, a BMC nurse, legal advocate and mentor for the Family Help Desk (FHD), which along with the Asthma Swim Program serves as the flagship Project HEALTH program, discussed the value of mentoring and how to find a mentor.

Mentoring, service and reflection are the three hallmarks of the Project HEALTH model, said Elizabeth J. Quinn, ’04, a coordinator of FHD. Quinn said the reflection component of the program, which involves weekly hour-long reflection meetings, was unique to Project HEALTH and that these meetings benefit both the volunteers and the clients.

“Thinking about why you’re there and how you’re doing your work is invaluable to the clients,” Quinn said.

Andy Choi, an undergraduate at GW, said reflection meetings would be an important part of the Washington program because he saw the meetings as crucial for developing the volunteers’ sense of purpose.

Since the Novartis Foundation awarded Project HEALTH a $76,000 grant to establish a site in Washington last November, coordinators from Harvard have hired a full-time site director who researched potential campus and hospital sites for the program. Kunal K. Merchant, ’01, the Washington site director, said the reputation of Project HEALTH has spread along the East Coast based on “word-of-mouth.”

“Before Project HEALTH came to D.C., we had to do a lot of lobbying to convince hospitals in other cities that we had a useful service to provide,” Merchant said. But he said doctors and hospitals in Washington were already aware of the program and were impressed by it.

“They were hungry for our services,” he said.

Choi said the start of the Washington site, which already has 140 GW students interested in participating in the program this fall, indicated the growing influence of the program.

“The impact of these meetings and the legacy of Harvard will be the successful start of a program that becomes its own thing and grows at GW,” he said.