Four members of the 新澳门六合彩内幕信息Social Work Society, Jacqueline Houston, Pedro Mejia-Serrano, Jordan Flatt, and Anice Altema, have been named VOT-ER Civic Health Fellows for the 2024 cohort. The formation of this team is the Social Work Society's most recent legislative initiative, which will run from April through November.
VOT-ER is a non-partisan, national nonprofit organization working to integrate civic engagement into healthcare. The Civic Health Fellowship trains and equips healthcare providers to mobilize patients towards civic engagement through community-based voter mobilization with the goal of addressing health equity concerns. Fellows are trained by an esteemed panel of instructors through a series of workshops. Instructors include Srdja Popovic, founder of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies; Pedja Stojicic, executive lead at People Power Health and instructor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Leah Ford, organizing director at VOT-ER; and Brian Archie, co-chair of Create a Healthier Niagara Falls Collaborative.
The 新澳门六合彩内幕信息Social Work Society members will launch a local civic access project this summer. Past projects have included pitches to hospital leadership, partnering with healthcare faculty to integrate voter access into their academic training, and establishing their clinical training sites as voter registration centers.
"Since we are all becoming intimately connected with the communities we serve within our MSW/BSW field placements, we are eager to recognize how a democratic process as fundamental to our society as elections can be a powerful tool for their health advocacy needs" said Jacqueline Houston. "Even as social workers, who have intimate knowledge of the judicial and public school system in our community, most of us do not participate in the elections of our circuit judges and school board officers. This is a really powerful opportunity to realize participation in justice-processes as therapeutic 鈥� an idea that is so central to the profession of social work."