VOICE at U of Tennessee Our first meeting will be on September 26th. First major event will be a Salsa dance class on September 29th. We are proud to announce that we are now a SCAVMA affiliated at Tennessee. We have also outlines for 3 mentoring programs- elementary, high school, and pre-vet. Names for the programs are coming soon. We have begun our elementary outreach program and have visited 2 elementary schools with plans for 3 more later this semester. We are looking forward to a great semester.
* SCAVMA/VOICE "One World, One Medicine" Multicultural Event –Sept. 29 5pm Vet Education Center Come enjoy yummy ethnic food and great performances from talented groups around campus!
* Latin Dance Lessons/ Latin American Heritage Month-Oct 11 Learn how to do salsa, bachata and merengue!
* Dean’s Diversity Lecture (Co-sponsored by VOICE)-Oct. 17 5:30p Dr. Sam Richards and Dr. Laurie Mulvey professors of sociology at Penn State will be guest lecturers on Diversity, Race, and Ethnicity. Come meet Roshi the portuguese water dog, service dog, and canine good citizen too!
* VOICE/MANRRS Undergraduate Info Session-Oct. 20 12-2pm We will talk to pre-vet undergrads about vet school and give them a tour of the complex. Lunch will be served!
-The name we choice for our mentoring program is DRIVE, Diversity Recruiting In Veterinary Medicine.
-With DRIVE, we have collaborated with SCAVMA and have a presentation at a local elementary school on Friday October 5th. We also introduced our program to the pre-vet club today and recieved alot of positive feedback. We plan on visiting 2 high schools later this semester and possibly the pre-vet club of a few near by universities.
-The goals of DRIVE are: *Encourage students to pursue veterinary medicine as a career *Stimulate interest in the feild of veterinary medicine *Educate students about veterinary medicine *Provide support to students
-Our next meeting is October 25th. The topic is still to come
-Our first event of the year is Tomorrow October 29th. Salsa Dance classes in honor of Latin American Heritage Month.
For more information please contact Paul Nolen, nnolenii@yahoo.com
On September 29, "One World One Medicine" was held at Cornell Veterinary College. It was cosponsored by SCAVMA, VOICE, and the Office of Student and Academic Services. It was open to the Cornell community, although most of the attendees were members of the veterinary community. It consisted of a dinner buffet which included food representing 16 countries different countries such as Malaysia, Moldova, Puerto Rico, Belgium, Zambia, Greece, Thailand, South Africa, and more. Most of these dishes were prepared by veterinary students. This was immediately followed by a performances from diverse groups from the Cornell campus including an African, Indian, Chinese, and Latin group as well as a performance by the veterinary college's own acapella group. All proceeds raised at this event will be donated to the Development Fund of the IVSA (International Veterinary Student Association) which monetarily assists veterinary programs in developing countries. All who attended enjoyed the event. Hopeful it will be continued in future years!
Hi everyone! This is Sarah from Texas A&M. We don't have a VOICE chapter here because we already have an organization called the Council on Diversity and Professionalism, started two years ago by myself and our former associate dean, Dr. Deborah Kochevar. We are currently a function of the Dean's Office and are fully funded by them. We may incorporate as a VOICE chapter at some point in the future, but for now it's really good for us to have the backing of the administration since our school environment has been a bit resistant to diversity programming. In any case, our recent events have been two movie nights (we showed "Quinceanera" and "Crash"), annual events to introduce new first-years to A&M if they didn't go here for undergrad, and a cultural cuisine potluck. We have our second annual potluck coming up in November and we're REALLY excited to be offering a medical Spanish course in the spring! It's taken forever to get that planned, but it should be great for students to get the opportunity to learn medical Spanish! :)
VOICE at Tennessee Our first event of the year was a sucess. Our salsa night event had about 26 participants and everyone said they had fun. Our next meeting is on October 25th and the topic will be "Cross Cultural Comparison of Veterinary Medicine; China/Taiwan and The United States." We have a very good speaker who attended veterinary school in Taiwan and is involved in the exchange program that the university has with China.
University of Illinois (finally!): September-Elliot Serrano from the Anti-Cruelty Society in downtown Chicago gave a presentation on dogfighting as it relates to inner-city communities. We learned a lot about the origins of dogfighting and it's effects in many communities around the country. I have the ppt if anyone is interested (if i can find it!).
October: We co-hosted a lunchtime talk with the Equine Club and the Production Medicine Club which was given by Dr. Gonzalo Fernandez, a vet from Bayer Animal Health, who spoke about communicating with Spanish-speaking pet owners and large animal farm workers. It was good and I have his contact info if anyone is interested.
November events (Asst Director from the Native American House) did not go as planned and our Salsa Night may have to be postponed until next semester. We are working on getting a representative from Pfizer to come next semester and speak about the importance of diversity as it relates to medicine. Our social worker here in the clinics met him at the AVMA conference this year and heard him speak at their mini diversity symposium. We have more information about that conference if anyone is interested. Hope everyone's chapter is doing well. Please forgive me for taking so long to post something. See you all in March!!!
VOICE at Tufts (sorry for the delay!) Unfortunately we haven't been as active this year with the talks as we were last year. Last year we had a panel discussion that included faculty members who spoke about their experiences working as a minority veterinarian or working with clientele of different cultural backgrounds. Another talk featured an animal control officer from Boston who spoke to us about his experiences working with the Asian populations around Boston and in a separate talk, the head of the Second Chance Fund for Animal Welfare spoke about the challenges of delivering animal care to underprivileged neighborhoods.
This year we have focused more on our monthly movie nights. We show two simultaneously. Last year we tried to show at least one documentary each time. This year we have shown God Grew Tired of Us and Mi Familia for our October movie night and The Namesake and Smoke Signals for our November movie night. We have ethnic foods ordered to the events to match the movies we're showing. Attendance for each movie night has been only around 10 students. We're probably going to combine Chinese New Year and Black History Month for our next movie night.
We also had our first Tae Kwon Do lesson yesterday! Turnout was great. It was a lunch time lesson taught by one of our black belt students. Food was offered too. We'll probably offer more of these along with African drumming lessons.
That's all from Tufts! We would love to get the name of that Pfizer speaker too if we could! Our board is made of soley third year students so we sadly won't be seeing you all at Symposium but our new board should be taking over by the end of February.