A new club spearheaded by two University of Pittsburgh sophomores aims to connect students to community organizations to address health, social, educational and medical needs in the city.
Shrreya Narayanakumar and Gella Hample have started KaleidoMed, a group of pre-health and pre-med students wanting to merge the institutional gap between the university and the city through medical volunteering and social work advocacy.
The goal is to emphasize social work values like education and tolerance with medicine, said Hample, 18, of O’Hara.
“A lot of students want to make these meaningful connections with our community, but they don’t necessarily know how to,” said Narayanakumar, 19, of Middleton, Mass. “We want to serve as a place where they’re able to bridge the gap from the university to the people in our Pittsburgh community.”
The goal of the group, Hample said, is to work with outside groups for advocacy events both on campus and in the community. This could include a sexual assault awareness and prevention event, and community health screenings, she said.
“We want to be able to build lasting partnerships so our students can consistently serve and learn,” Narayanakumar said. “We focus on long-term relationships rather than just one-off events or volunteering.”
That’s what Hample calls “volunteer matchmaking.” She hopes the club can connect students to volunteer experience, mentorships or internships in fields or specialties of interest to them.
“We can pair people into these meaningful, long-term, sustained relationships instead of having these one-off events,” Hample said.
Partnering with longstanding groups is crucial, Hample said. She emphasized the importance of combining medicine and social work to approach underserved groups respectfully.
The goal, she said, is to build empathy and understanding among students to better connect with the communities they serve.
“We want to make sure that what we’re doing is not just for show,” Hample said. “We want to purposefully engage.”
Hample is majoring in social work and biology. Narayanakumar is a biology and public health major.
They both believe that the excitement of Pitt students matched with the longstanding work of community providers can prove to be a success for their club.
“Students, especially in the pre-health field, are itching to be a part of the community, but it’s hard to find resources especially when you’re in a new city, and especially if you’re a freshman,” Narayanakumar said. “We really want to be a group that can provide all of these resources for our members.”