American Service-Learning: Health & Disabilities Service Project

Grace Hsu : Stanford Coordinator

Sachiko Furukawa : Japan Coordinator

Project Themes

1. Disability Care
2. Elderly Care
3. Mental Health
4. Culturally Competent Medicine

Project Overview

This project will take a look at how U.S. non-profit organizations serve the health care needs of many different patient populations. We will focus on the care of the elderly, the disabled, and veterans and address health in the context of culture and socioeconomics. Additionally we will compare what issues both Japanese and American societies face in the next decade and discuss the various approaches each society has taken toward solving their problems.

During the project week, we'll spend a large portion of our time interacting with and assisting physically disabled children with basic tasks at a local camp. We hope that these few days will provide a particularly rewarding experience. We'll also travel to a veterans' hospital, where we'll see first-hand how the American government directly provides for its citizens. Later we'll go to San Francisco, where we'll see that a variety of non-profit groups have exclusively dedicated their services to certain ethnic groups and health concerns including domestic abuse, mental illness and AIDS.

Project Group Roster

Project Calendar (Current)

Pre-Program Readings

ASL Health & Disabilities Yahoo! Group

Chad Morse, VIA Program Director, Email: chad@viaprograms.org