Tonight, Andy, Michelle, and I went to the CSA staff meeting to present Team HBV in hopes of gaining their support and getting permission to speak at their club's general meeting. Andy did all of the talking and Michelle and I were there for moral support! We seemed to get a good initial reaction. I think the CSA members found many of the facts about hepatitis B surprising. Their guesses for the prevalence of hepatitis B were much lower than the actual...I think some of the guesses were 40 million, 50 million (athough one person did say 1 billion). For sure, I think Andy's comments that based on the statistics, some of the people in the room may have hepatits B or not have the antibodies for it made an impact.
Something exciting that hopefully works out was CSA's proposal to have Team HBV serve as the benefactor for their annual charity concert. They currently don't have anyone in mind and it's open to others, but if we keep pushing for it, then Team HBV may be able to do this. That would be a very good, exciting opportunity. We will definitely bring this up at our next meeting. The money from this concert would go to a charity/non-profit organization, meaning that if Team HBV was the benefactor, the money from this event could be donated to maybe Asian Liver Center (not too sure, but we will check on the details) or even towards funding vaccinations in China (if we can find a specific program in China to be the recipient of the funds). It's still very up in the air, but I think this would be a good thing to pursue.
Tonight, some of the officers of Team HBV at UCLA will be going down to Chinese Student Association's staff meeting. We will be explaining the goals of the club and why they should care about helping the cause. One third of China has been exposed to hepatitis B. We hope that even though some of the students in CSA may not have strong ties to China any longer, their love and appreciation of their culture and their people will motivate them to take action if the mere fact that hepatitis B is a big problem is not enough already. This 10-min presentation of our club tonight is to get approval to speak at their general meeting next quarter, so we can encourage people to join Team HBV or just help in some other way. We will explain that members will primarily be focusing on health education and fundraising presently, but we hope to expand to bigger projects after the club has become more established. This will mark our first presentation to a culture club at UCLA and hopefully will be the first of many as we reach out to other culture clubs during our recruiting efforts.
Last night, the Team HBV officers at UCLA got together again - this time to watch the documentary "Another Life" and to discuss plans for the organization. The documentary again emphasized some very important statistics that will be important when we are spreading awareness and educating people around campus and throughout the community. One person dying from hepatitis related conditions every 30 seconds worldwide must surely make an impact in people's minds.
After the documentary, we discussed plans for the organization. Winter quarter is really coming up fast. We talked about membership such as how members would apply and the role members would play. We decided that for now, while the club is still new and trying to become firmly established and gain more funds, members will primarily be focusing on health education both on campus and in the community. Team HBV will be collaborating with another club on campus APA Health C.A.R.E, primarily by serving as the hepatitis B educators at the APA Health C.A.R.E tent at various health sites. We hope that many of our members will be multi-lingual, so they can give presentations in other languages such as Korean and Chinese. Of course, we still need English speakers, so the club is NOT restricted to those who know more than one language. Fundraising is also a present goal; in the future, we hope to expand these fundraising projects to help pay for things overseas such as vaccinations. We are all super excited; it was definitely hard to keep the ideas limited to right now, for many ideas pitched are more long-term such as having "mother-daughter" clubs with high schools (Members from Team HBV at UCLA would serve as the mother organization for a high school Team HBV chapter - daughter chapter). We also want to recruit people in film and graphic design...maybe film a new documentary or comes up with some cool hepatitis Bdesigns for a t-shirts and whatnot!
Well, that's the gist of what we talked about last night...overall, it was a very productive meeting, and we are now even more excited to put these plans into action!
Tomorrow at 8:30pm, the officers of Team HBV at UCLA will be getting together once again, this time to watch the documentary "Another Life." It's about 30 minutes long according to our VP of Community Outreach, Alina. Supposedly, whoever hasn't earned enough points on EV will be providing the snacks. Haha. We're all pretty excited, though. Every event we have as officers brings us that much closer to realizing the full potential of the organization and to the point where we'll actually be recruiting other members. So far, everything seems to be going well. We just secured our meeting room for next quarter, and hopefully at our meeting tomorrow, we will hear some updates on reserving a room for the documentary screening in winter quarter. We have also organized a list of the culture clubs and health clubs at UCLA and the officers have started filling out who will be in charge of making contact with the clubs, so we can present Team HBV at one of their meetings. Our VP of Finances has also been hard at work, getting our tax ID and working on opening a bank account. Everything is slowly coming together. I'm sure by Winter quarter, we'll be ready to push forward! Tomorrow, we'll also hopefully be hearing more from our President about the conference since midterm and GRE studying prevented us from hearing everything. All in all, I'd say we're making smooth progress and we're becoming a close family already. =)
We just had our second officer meeting last night. We got to hear a bit about the conference from Andy. Hopefully, we'll have more time at our next meeting and can ask him even more. It was shocking to hear some of the statistics on hepatitis B. Some of what Andy told us was:
Roughly 375 million people have hepatitis B worldwide.
One person dies from a HBV related death about every 30 seconds.
Something must be done to change this!
We also discussed our plans for next year. Starting winter quarter, we will officially be recruiting new members for Team HBV. Very exciting! Our first event will be a documentary screening. Although we are not sure of the exact details, we're all very eager to host our very first official Team HBV event and recruit more people to the cause. UCLA has so many culture and health clubs, so we'll definitely be paying a visit to many of them to advertise the club.
Some other ideas include having fortune cookies with a hepatitis B related fortune (it will include some statistic) as well as creating a chart that shows common statistics of causes of death (e.g. drunk driving) compared to hepatitis B related deaths.
If anyone has any ideas, let us know, so we can try them here at UCLA!
So, our live-streaming party ended a bit later than expected just because we were having so much fun! Here's a bit of what we learned from the portion of the conference that we watched:
Team HBV Live-Streaming Party!
Date: Novemeber 14, 2009
Location: Minh-Vu’s apartment
Officers Present: Samantha Kim, Alina Wong, Alana Taniguchi, Minh-Vu Nguyen
Grant Seeking and Writing
State goal and objectives
Construct timeline
Estimate costs and create budget
Corporations that Give
Target, Costco, Bank of America, Safeway, Walmart
Look for Grant section on webpage
Community Research and Evaluation
Goal accomplished?
Constructive Suggestions
Quantitative & Qualitative Evaluation
Collegiate Chapters
Harvard:
Multilingual brochures
Local clinic information
Follow up survey (multilingual) – Assess presentation effectiveness and clinics
Improve and standardize curriculum
China
Publicity: HBV fair, posters, brochures, awards, doctors, concert, expansion to community, promotion to other colleges
Cornell: B-Aware
B-Aware Certification Program
Surveyed retention
Analyzed survey results to determine specific actions to take to improve program
University of Pennsylvania
Use popular college pastimes to spread awareness (basketball tournaments)
Setup and Contact
Logistics
Sponsors/Prizes – solicitation in multiple languages
Berkeley
Problem Identification, Assessment, Program Rationale
Evaluation: rubric and results, improving knowledge of Hep B
Replication at other campuses
Duke
Jade Ribbon Dance
China
Use of art to send a message – be creative and “out there” for people to remember you and your cause
We got some useful tips on what we can do when we start recruiting and holding events, and we had a lot of fun talking, sharing stories, and just bonding with each other. This is going to be a great year, and we're all even more excited to put our ideas in action. The other Team HBV officers are the greatest. =) I can't wait to work with all of them as we spread awareness of Hepatitis B!
In less than 2 hours, the officers of Team HBV at UCLA will be getting together to watch the live streaming of the Team HBV Conference 2009! We are all super excited to learn more about how to get the club going, raising awareness about Hepatitis B and liver cancer, and fundraising ideas! Not only will we be learning more about how to support such a great cause, but this is a great chance for all of us Team HBV officers to get to bond even more since we'll be spending so much time together in the future. Too bad Andy can't make it, but I'm sure he's having fun learning at the actual conference at Stanford. =) We will be supporting him in spirit at our party later today!
So, the Team HBV Live-Streaming Party has finally started! Four officers present!...Hopefully more to come! So far, it's been pretty interesting learning about outreach methods, questions to ask, chilling with fellow officers, trying to pick food to fill our tummies while we learn about spreading awareness! More updates to come as our party continues!
