This week was my final week in the life course scholar program. We wrapped up by presenting our Healthy Aging Projects at the Healthy Aging Symposium. It was a great feeling seeing our work over the past quarter represented in a physical form through our posters and to have the chance to speak with guests about what we’ve done and learned. I’m incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of such a program. I’ve grown friendships through this cohort and have learned and gained more skills than I could have ever imagined. Through the course of planning our HAPs, we gained valuable event planning, advertising, and community outreach skills. Prior to joining this program, I never really considered the state of seniors living in poverty. We always hear the term “starving children”, and we tend to see fundraisers targeted more towards children in poverty, very rarely do we ever see this for seniors. It was unfortunate to learn more about this in this program, but awareness is crucial towards being able to make an impact. It was an incredible feeling returning to the West Center and being able to provide those seniors with things as small as basic hygiene products that they may not otherwise be able to afford. This is something that we definitely tend to take for granted. I’ve been referring all my younger friends that will still be going to UCSD in the fall to take part in this incredible and life-changing program. I’d like to thank Professor Bussell and Professor Bussell for all that we have learned and for allowing me to take part in such an amazing program. I hope to carry over what I have learned from the Life Course Scholar Program into my professional career and continue to give back wherever I can.
Our inter-generational walkathon finally took place today at Balboa Park! Professor Lewis and Bussell had recommended that we reach out to existing senior walking groups to invite them to the event in order to receive a greater turnout, and this was great advice. We ended up getting a pretty sizeable turnout, and even got a few additional students from other student orgs at UCSD to show up! My primary responsibility for today was making sure to document and photograph the event. We have the email addresses of the leaders of the walking groups, so I’ll be sure to share these photos with them as well. We did make a few mistakes as we didn’t have any definitive guidelines to follow in planning this event, but hopefully if another group in next year’s cohort chooses to continue with this HAP, they can improve from our lessons. The biggest issue was t-shirt sizes! It turned out that we should have ordered much more larges and extra larges because we were left with several smalls and mediums that no one wanted because they believed they would fit too snug on them. The seniors got very excited when we told them that we would be raffling off prizes for everyone that filled out a post-event survey. So hopefully next year, if a group in the cohort chooses to continue with this event, they will be able to fundraise and have more items to raffle off. I loved the conversations I had with everyone that came out! All the seniors in attendance were incredibly grateful that we organized this event for them because they said their walking groups don’t normally walk at Balboa Park but they loved this location. Many of the seniors I spoke to had mentioned that they suffered from severe health problems before, but being physically active and joining these walking groups has improved their health noticeably. This was incredible to hear because the main purpose of our HAP was to demonstrate the benefits that an active lifestyle can have on a senior and to promote more physical activity especially in seniors in San Diego. We will be wrapping up our HAP by pulling data from the post-event surveys and completing our poster with our findings for the Healthy Aging Symposium!
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Tanveer MoundiWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
June 2019
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