Service Engagement

I got involved with ENCompass at the beginning of my first semester. The mission of ENCompass is to bridge the gap between medical care and social care in Columbus. It was based off a program called Health Leads, which started in Boston as a group of college kids providing resources for people in their community with medical problems. Founder Rebecca Onie explained the idea in a TED talk from 2012: https://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_onie_what_if_our_healthcare_system_kept_us_healthy

The health problems that many people face are not strictly medical. For example, the lack of heat in somebody’s home may be contributing to a chest cold. Our medical system is not set up to always fix the root problem, and that is where ENCompass comes in.

We work at many different sites, including food pantries and hospitals. We meet clients, assess their needs through questions and evaluations, and put together resource packets for them. This is over-simplifying a very detailed process, but we end up giving clients specific instructions on how and when to access nearby resources that they may not have heard of. We follow up with the client two weeks later to see how things went, and we can re-evalutate from there.

I volunteer at a hospital branch every week, and this new location has thrown some curve balls at us. There are language barriers that I had never considered before, and the whole experience in general has cast a new light onto medical and social care for me. I see how complex the issue is, and how many people it takes to help solve a problem. Through this service I have gained a new respect for medical professionals and the process that people of a lower socio-economic status must go through to get care.