Rachel’s Classroom - Mini Grant Recipient #3
Rachel Shore’s giving back journey started in Peru. After growing up in Asheville, NC, Rachel volunteered for the Peace Corps and spent a few years teaching health education and outreach to kids in the South American country. After she moved back to the States to go to medical school in Portland, Oregon, she found herself proficient in Spanish with lots of teaching experience and a desire to help.
It wasn’t long before she made a connection with the Morrison Child and Family Services, a nonprofit mental health organization dedicated to helping children with a variety of services; Morrison has Immigrant Youth Services programs that work with unaccompanied children without legal status and provides them with unification to sponsors in the US (She began by leading online classes through the pandemic, meeting the kids via Zoom to teach them about health and sex education.
“These kids have been through so much. They’ve been through a lot to even get to the border of the US, then go through even more being isolated to everything that feels familiar to them,” Rachel says about why she wants to promote health education with this group. “I really want to build a connection between them and what’s going on in Portland around them. I just want to be a part of building a sense of belonging to the US.”
Some of the children Rachel taught health, sex education, and nutrition classes to while in Peru with the Peace Corp.
Rachel’s Project
Through her student group, the Immigrant Health Student Interest Group at Oregon Health and Science University, Rachel has gathered five volunteers to help lead educational workshops in person at the center. Their subjects will vary, from gardening to health education. Rachel has already done some demonstrations, such as bringing in balloons and a blood pressure cuff to teach about hypertension, and will use the grant to invest in other supplies, such as art and teaching supplies. One day, she hopes that she and her team can take the kids to a Portland Timbers soccer game and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.
Why is it important to you?
“Immigrant health is my first priority, as a medical student planning to pursue Infectious Disease as a subspecialty. I have lived and worked on public health projects in various parts of Latin America, and have seen the health disparities and human rights violations that this population has been subjected to. Many of the teens at MCFS spend the majority of their adolescence in shelters such as this one, so it is critical that they get some exposure to health education and experience connection to the outside world. For teens who have been separated from their parents at the border, who are awaiting placements in international foster care, or who are awaiting asylum claim decisions, it means a lot to experience a sense of welcoming and belonging in this country that is foreign them. Our volunteer group hopes to help them feel at home here as much as we can.
While in Peru with the Peace Corp.
What impact do you expect this project to have?
“1. Community building: we hope that our project will help to connect MCFS youth with the world outside of the shelter, helping them to feel connected to the US and feel comfortable establishing themselves here if it is the best option for their safety.
2. Health outcomes: our health, sex education, and nutrition classes will hopefully improve health outcomes for students who have not had the opportunity to receive this kind of education before. During my Master's of Public Health thesis in 2023, I hope to measure health outcomes for our youth to ensure that our educational interventions are generating positivity outcomes.
3. Relationships: we hope to create a long-lasting, sustainable relationship between OHSU service learning groups and MCFS, so that student volunteers may continue to do educational projects with MCFS youth for years to come.