Savannah Boersma

For USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

Student Trips and Transformations is a service-oriented group that recently started at Bellin College. The idea came from a similar program at St. Norbert College, with the goal of nurturing health care professionals who are socially informed, empathetic and have a better understanding of the connections between health care and poverty.

As nursing and radiological science students, we often focus on the skills aspect of health care, not always looking at the whole picture; in essence, focusing on the illness rather than the person and their lifestyle as a whole. By looking at the whole person, one finds that there are other factors affecting one’s health care other than just their health and based on that, they have different needs. For example, how does one control their diabetes when every meal they eat is at a soup kitchen or from a truck? Pancakes and peanut butter sandwiches don’t quite cut it. How does one not get frostbite when they’re forced to walk from place to place for a chance at a little warmth and a meal? These are just the surface of many issues that people face. We have to treat the person as a whole, and that means working around the issues they face.

Last January, a group of 10 Bellin students and faculty member Deb Lidbury traveled to the south side of Chicago to do a week of service. The group worked with Port Ministries, United Human Service Center (food pantry), the Chicago Food Depository, and Su Casa (shelter for women and children). We did a broad variety of activities, collectively doing 307 hours of service as a group. All told, we: made 160 sandwiches, made dinner for 50 people at a women's shelter; sorted 62 bags of clothes to be handed out, packed and sorted 24,777 pounds of food at the Chicago food depository, served 133 meals at a soup kitchen, passed out 120 bags of food at a food pantry, served 500 meals on the bread truck, sorted 100 bags of food and helped offer free health care at Port Ministries Free Clinic. As a group we learned so much more about what we can offer as both health care professionals and community members. This trip brought together 11 people, who all wanted to make a difference but weren’t sure how; who all thought: "I am just one person — what can I do, when there is so much to be done?" To that, I have to say, tiny drops fill the ocean, just as one kind act is what makes the world a better place.

Currently, we are working with the Brown County Homeless & Housing Coalition to do some community outreach in the Green Bay Community. On Friday, we will be raising awareness about homelessness by holding an event called “Shack-a-thon”. A group of students from Bellin College will be staying outside overnight in cardboard shacks at Festival Foods on West Mason Street and sharing information about the incidence of homelessness in Green Bay. We will have a food donation box, with the donations being given to the House of Hope. The group will be serving a meal at the Housing Resource Day on Nov. 17 to give those in need a nutritious meal. It is our goal to become much more active in the community through outreach activities, while continuing to do service in other communities as well.

I hope that this is reminder that you can make a difference, even if it is through the smallest things. “Be the change that you wish to see in the world” — Ghandi

If you would like to donate to our cause, please feel free to contact Deb Lidbury at deborah.lidbury@bellincollege.edu.

Savannah Boersma is a student at Bellin College.