OACS 3/15 Updates
Spring Break 2018 Service Experiences
Nearly 600 students involved with student-led service organizations advised by OACS participated in service experiences during spring break. Teams traveled to Belize, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, within the United States to support the work of non-profit organizations around the world.
OACS student organizations that participated in service experiences during spring break include:
- Alpha Epsilon Delta (AED)
- Alternative Spring Break
- AMIGOS
- Global Brigades
- Habitat for Humanity
- Manna International
- MedLife
DIVE Update
Seminar 2
In the second seminar of the DIVE program, the cohort watched one of the introductory episodes of Nashville Public Television’s Next Door Neighbor series. Some of the reflections that arose from this episode were the differences between refugees and immigrants, the high responsibility role of refugee youth in newly resettled refugee families, and how many barriers exist to refugees to becoming self-sufficient within their 90-day period. After reflection, the cohort broke up into their design groups to engage in an empathy exercise. Each group was tasked with making a monthly budget for a family based on how many family members, the employment status of the parents and older children, and their acceptance into the Refugee Cash Assistance Program. Students had to think of many aspects of the resettlement process in order to account for all the necessary expenses including housing, food, transportation, childcare, and repaying the flight cost loan.
Seminar 3
This past week, the DIVE cohort had its third seminar, which marked the halfway point of the seminar series. The contextual information of this seminar focused on refugee’s access to and experience within the healthcare system in Nashville. The cohort heard from Dr. Laurel Lunn, former Ph.D. candidate at Vanderbilt who wrote her thesis on this topic. Dr. Lunn shared the qualitative and quantitative data collected from the study and also shared some of the constraints and limitations to conducting research with and within the refugee community. This opened the students’ eyes to cultural limitations and interpretations of health care, especially preventative health care.
The design lab time of this seminar was spent applying the Define stage of the human-centered design tool to their design challenges. As community partners presented the students with a design challenge, the Define stage helps design groups to narrow their focus to a specific question that, along with their considerations of context and constraints, drives their design process into the Ideation and Prototype phases. Students began working in groups to narrow their challenge to a specific question. They will continue working in groups with their community partner over the spring break to identify a final design question before the next seminar.