Just a reminder to anyone applying for an Executive Board position that TODAY (Friday 9/3) is the last day to turn in an application. All applications must be emailed in by 5PM. Please let us know if you have any questions.

We'll be having a general info session this Tuesday (8/31/2010) at 7 PM. Please meet us at the THH main lobby, right off of Trousdale, to learn more about CHIP and eboard applications.

Getting started with CHIP is easy! Just follow these steps.

1. There is a link to your left which says “New Member? Sign up here!”. Click it.
2. Fill out the requested information and submit the form.

After you have done this, you will be signed up for our weekly newsletter which will inform you about our future events and you will be considered a member of CHIP. You will want to bookmark our homepage because you will need to sign-in with your username and password when you want to volunteer for events.

Hello new members! For this post, I hope to address some of the questions you might have about CHIP.

The overall goal of CHIP is to spread awareness of prevalent and preventable health issues and increase healthy outcomes in the low-income, under-serviced areas surrounding USC. To accomplish this, we offer free health screenings and workshops at local community centers and plan programming for after-school programs at local elementary schools. We call each of our events “healthsites”.

As a volunteer, you will have opportunities to be trained so that you can provide these services. We offer training in blood pressure auscultation, usage of glucometers, and health communication. Once you have completed these trainings, you will be able to provide these services in the community and help identify people who are at risk for heart disease and diabetes, two of the most prevalent problems in our community. If you do not wish to be trained, you may still help with our children’s programming or with crowd control and community outreach efforts when we have larger events. We also have committees which will help you practice communicating health advice in alternative languages, especially Spanish and Korean.

You may also choose to help with our after-school programs, where we teach kids about healthy living and making good choices through fun activities! No training is necessary for these events, and the kids love our activities!

Overall, CHIP is a great way to gain experience interacting with patients and community members in a healthcare context. This is not a generic pre-med organization. We are extremely active and expect all of our members to play an active role in the community! Because you will be working directly with people in the surrounding community and possibly revealing serious health complications to them, the interactions you will experience are much more personal than in many other volunteer situations. We expect our members to be mature and nurturing individuals who genuinely care about the health of others.