Jordan Haber and Safa Salem, both third-years in the College of Medicine, are two of the 2023-24 Columbus-Athens Schweitzer Fellows, a program that provides future health professionals with the tools needed to conduct a yearlong service project that targets local communities. Credit: Lantern Photo File
Two Ohio State medical students are developing a curriculum to bring health education to a local school where many students face food insecurity.
Jordan Haber and Safa Salem, both third-years in the College of Medicine, are two of the 2023-24 Columbus-Athens Schweitzer Fellows, a program that provides future health professionals with the tools needed to conduct a yearlong service project that targets local communities. Their project will provide health education and healthy resources to the students of Windsor STEM Academy, a Columbus City school in the Linden community.
“To solve world hunger, one of the most crucial steps is to solve the hunger in your backyard,” Haber said. “You don’t have to necessarily go far and wide to reach very needy communities — you can literally in your backyard make an impact.”
Their fellowship project was born out of an assignment Salem completed as an undergraduate at Harvard University. She worked at a local school with an underdeveloped health curriculum and students who had limited access to food and water.
Salem said the project raised money to implement health education classes, as well as provide access to water bottles and water fountains for students’ use.
The Boston students felt like people had cared about them for the first time, Salem said.
As graduate students at Ohio State, Haber and Salem became friends and created the student organization CARE — Cultural Awareness Representation and Education — to address issues of marginalization and inequity within health care and to train more empathetic and educated physicians.
Involvement in the Schweitzer Fellowship became a continuation of the projects each had previously worked on, Haber said.
In Columbus, Haber and Salem are partnering with Windsor STEM Academy. Linden is in a food desert, barring many students from access to nutritious food, as well as having no formal health education curriculum in the school, Salem said.
Launching in October, Salem said the curriculum will not only teach students how to make healthy decisions, but give them the necessary tools to continuously choose them.
The classes will focus on nutrition, mental health, support systems and other health-related topics that children and teens face. A food pantry for students and families at the school is also being developed.
Medical students at Ohio State can volunteer to teach hour-long health classes that fulfill the volunteer hours necessary to become a doctor. The materials and curriculum provided to the school are designed as a lasting model that can continue after Haber and Salem’s yearlong fellowship ends.
Salem said the project highlights the importance of making positive change at a local level through asking a community what they need and finding ways to implement changes in a sustainable way.
“See it as a means to arm a bunch of children with knowledge to make adequate, healthy choices about their futures,” Salem said.
