The Importance of Public Health

In my previous slate post, I described my issues and concerns for public health. I spoke about my interest in travelling, wanting to see people, and I urged people to continue wearing their masks. Since that post, I have conducted more research, finding fundraisers that will help with the production of masks/distributing masks to the homeless. On Thursday (5/20/21) during my advisory period, I gave a presentation on the issue I wanted to address. In the presentation, I included a link to a GoFundMe, which will help to provide more masks to homeless individuals. I decided to do this because ever since quarantine began, we haven’t been able to go many places. There are a few things that inspired me, making me passionate about public health, and those are: helping others and travelling. During my research, I learned how many people are having a difficult time during this pandemic. I’ve learned how many different things have been affected by it, such as overcrowding in prisons and mask distribution for homeless people. Although I could not act on the bigger issues like overcrowding in prisons, I could at least speak out about something we’ve all been affected by: masks.

To take action, to be an agent of change, I decided to present to my advisory class. My presentation was 6 slides, including links to GoFundMe’s & other informational articles.

This is a screenshot of my screen-share during my advisory presentation.

Overall, I enjoyed creating and taking action for this project. I haven’t experienced making an actual change before in projects like these. It was very interesting to make a whole presentation and promote my ideas. Hopefully my presentation will have taken an effect and persuaded people to continue wearing their masks and staying safe. Thankfully, a vaccine has been created and maybe people both teenagers and adults, can get the vaccine. This will also help keep public health in check! Something I could have done better for this project is improving my slideshow presentation. I think I could have added a lot more information on the matter. I had lots of links to articles, and I think I should have added more information from them.

My initial ideas for this project were to create posters to hang up around a park I have gone to since I was younger or to create and donate to fundraisers to help mask production. I have a few designs that I created for the posters, because at first I was committing to that idea. If I were to do this project again, I would test that idea and see if posters would have had more of an effect than a presentation!

Initial design ideas for posters.

Something I’ve learned about myself is that I really do want to help others, and I feel much stronger about this idea than I thought I did. Something I’ve learned about other people is how many people are willing to create organizations and donate If anyone would like to help make this change, you can create your own fundraiser at https://www.gofundme.com/c/blog/mask-for-coronavirus, or donate to Carpenter’s Place, an organization working to create and distribute more masks.

Here is my annotated bibliography.