Eleven Volunteer Service Awards were granted this spring; these awardees will be spending between 8 weeks to more than a year volunteering. This and following blogs profile these individuals.
Victoria Kusztos with the GlobeMed chapter of Tufts University will be volunteering this summer in Nepal. Victoria will be part of a team working with GlobeMed’s partner in Nepal, PHASE (Practical Help Achieving Self- Empowerment), an NGO which operates in the rural, mountainous regions of Nepal to provide healthcare, education, and livelihood support to local communities. One of the projects is an extension of PHASE’s focus on preventative health care – implementing routine health checks at local secondary schools. The vision, hearing, and physical exams conducted, would simultaneously allow the organization to monitor the health of the community (especially children) and provide PHASE a mechanism for assessing its own long-term impact. The data from the health checks quantitatively measures the progress of established projects, provide guidelines for further research, and enables follow up on the health checks which were initiated in 2016.