Project Connect

Margaret (Kit) Carney, Summer 2018

While at Project Connect this summer, I had the opportunity to be both humbled and encouraged. Another medical student and myself were placed at this day camp for children experiencing homelessness to act as camp counselors. I was placed with the five to seven year-olds, along with an undergraduate intern, two teachers' aids, and an elementary school teacher. Together, this team was in charge of about twenty kids a day. In the mornings, we would run and supervise academic and enrichment activities for the kids to ensure that they would be set up for success for the upcoming school year. These activities included crafting, reading, doing math problems, playing board games, and working on vocabulary flashcards. After lunch, we would often take the kids to the neighborhood pool. Once a week, the entire camp would go on a field trip to locations like King's Island, Coney Island, and the Beach Water Park. After camp hours, I was able to partner with the other medical student placed at Project Connect to create and administer a nutritional survey which we used to develop a nutritional intervention for the children. Due to the survey results' suggestion that the campers lacked knowledge about what foods were healthy and which were not, we designed recipe books and cooking demonstrations that included recipes that were healthy, affordable, and did not require a stove, and shared them with the campers. We allotted each camper ingredients to make the recipe along with us as we explained what about those ingredients made them nutritious. To encourage these campers to make these recipes in their own living space, we provided them with additional ingredients with which we instructed them to take home and cook. We then collected data concerning camper interest in and understanding of eating healthy following the intervention.

While physically exhausting, this job offered me the opportunity to serve a community I love in a tangible, simple way. I needed to know no medical jargon or biochemical pathway; I only needed to show up and serve. The simplicity of my job did not, however, make it easy. Every day I saw the deep affect that poverty, a lack of transportation, and a food desert can have upon adolescents. Having the opportunity to see the complexities of these social determinants of health play out in real lives will affect the way in which I approach conversations with my future patients. I now feel more confident in my ability to address and converse knowledgably about homelessness in Cincinnati and the resources available for patients experiencing it.