Introduction By Grace Di Cecco, Service-Learning Teacher Assistant
This spring, freshman honors students in Professor Sarah Finn’s First-Year Writing course “Science, Technology, and Human Values” have participated in Service-Learning by joining on-campus activist groups that relate to course themes of science, technology, and human values. Their service work has informed their learning in the course as we explore how writing can be used for activism and enacting change, and they have joined vibrant communities on campus by getting involved with issues they are passionate about. Below, students share the causes they have dedicated themselves to and reflect on their experiences so far. This is the fourth post that kicks off a series of six about First-Year students serving Northeastern through Activism. Stay tuned for more posts!
GlobeMed
By Service-Learning Students Shailee Shah, Ann Kogosov, Lilia Merbouche
Pictured above: Shailee Shah, Ann Kogosov, Lilia Merbouche
GlobeMed is an organization that partners students with grassroots movements around the world in order to raises awareness for various health equity issues. The Northeastern chapter specifically partners with a group in Uganda called Kitovu. With Kitovu, we focus on clean water sources for rural villages in the Masaka region of Uganda. We fundraise to provide Kitovu with the money to support these sanitation and hygiene projects. In addition, we have weekly discussions regarding various global health issues, such as women’s reproductive rights, international healthcare systems, and prisoner’s welfare around the world. Our role in the club involves everything from leading discussions to tabling to creating fundraisers.
The skills we develop as we participate in more and more GlobeMed events translate very well into the environment of our classroom. Both the club and class center around free and open discussion. Through the club, we learn how to talk about sensitives topics in a way that encourages constructive conversation. These skills translate to many of the debates we have had in class, and vice versa. We use the topics and discussions we have in GlobeMed, and bring them to the class room by writing about them for the projects we do. The ability to apply what we learn in the classroom to our student organization highlights the utility of the skills we are learning. By learning through such real-world applications, we gain skills that we can use in future experiences.
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