Inspiring Youth in the Central Valley to Pursue Healthcare Fields

As a youth and community partnerships coordinator with Central Valley Health Network, one of my first big projects with my host site was to help plan their annual Growing Health Leaders Conference. This was a very exciting opportunity to hone my event planning skills as I got to work on outreaching to different organizations in my community to come speak and table at the event - making and maintaining partnerships my host site has. I also was able to learn a lot about purchasing, graphic design, and the fine details of event planning. My favorite part was making and putting together the name tags for the students! In addition, we got to tour the new medical school in our area - California Health Sciences University - where the conference was held. 

When the day finally came to have the event, we got to the site early to set up and have everything ready. We had a lot of help from Central California National Health Corps members who came all the way to Fresno! They helped to put together conference bags for the students and to direct them to the different presentations. When the students came in around 9am - we had about 230 students from the surrounding Fresno and Kings County attend the Growing health Leaders Conference. They all had a great time with the keynote speaker, healthcare presentations, and the resource fair. We had a variety of healthcare professionals show up to give presentations such as speakers from emergency medicine, genetic counseling, and dentistry. We also had many hands-on activities such as ultrasound labs, suturing practice, and making pedigree charts. We had over 10 different resources in attendance with many from local colleges and health centers in the area. For lunch, we also had Panda express donate food and a local ice cream vendor called Ampersand come. At our closing session, we had raffle prizes with generous gifts donated from our partner health centers. Overall, the event was a success and we hope to inspire the future generation of healthcare professionals in the Central Valley.