Partners In Health

Dear Fraea,

Thanks so much for your comment. One idea is to show a short video clip (we have many options available on YouTube Link) and host a discussion around that clip. Another good resource is this 20-minute video clip, "Haiti's Heroes" which focuses on PIH's work post-earthquake in the Port-au-Prince settlement camps: Link

Gathering emails can be difficult, but is an important step in keeping track of who attended your event. Instead of passing around email sign-ups, maybe you pass around a clipboard to "sign in" to the event. Or you can incentivize email sign-ups in some way, for example by raffling off a copy of Mountains Beyond Mountains.

You're totally right that no matter how great the presentation, movie, or discussion, the most important piece is giving people some kind of action to take, and making sure they feel like they have a productive role to play. I think this comes down to being really specific about what opportunities are available to people as individuals, and as a campus community.

Once you educate your audience on the options (broadly speaking: fundraising, education, and advocacy) and talk a bit about what those each involve, you could try a goal-setting exercise to answer the question "What do we want to achieve as a community?" and to help students have a bigger stake in the growth of the community. The community organizing team at PIH are currently working to put together some toolkit-like resources that will help to break down those three categories, but we also invite you to be creative as to how you want to interpret fundraising, education, and advocacy around PIH Canada in your community.

You also mentioned that you don't know anyone in your class or campus who's interested in global health. I'd be curious to hear how others in the Students for PIH-Canada community would answer Fraea's question: Does anyone have other ideas for getting people together / gathering interest?

Let's keep this conversation going!

Best,
Elise

PS - Adding a comment below will not send any notification to previous commenters or to the list. In order to generate more group-wide discussion, be sure to copy/paste your comment into an email for the whole group: studentsforpih-canada@groups.p ih.org

I totally agree with your second point. Many people attend these sorts of events with good intentions and that is often all they come away with. Prahaps this is something that could be addressed from a slightly different angle. Maybe instead of exhibiting, in essence, what these people tend to already know-the need of aid for the destitute and shed load of facts that can leave you both overwhelmed and feeling as though anything but major contribution is insufficient-it could be more effective speaking directly to their initiative and organizing a fully interactive "learning day" where, from start to finish, the result of the days work (probably just a couple of hours) is entirely in the hands of the attendants. All that you need is a short but inspiring introduction, a good scenario-maybe implementing an epidemiological survey in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake-and to present a clear way of how to do more. This kind of event creats a great environment for syncretic debate and a hands on way of solving a problem. Both highly relevant qualitys.

I believe a sense of self gratification is crucial to a lasting positive outcome. The event would certainly benefit from an experienced mentor but it's not central to success. I know this doesn't answer the question of how to gather an audience but if you can it's worth a shot.

Ollie