Social Justice in American Medicine (SJAM), a campus organization that studies healthcare injustices and participates in related community service, is raising money to build flu kits for the Sr. Maura Brannick Clinic in South Bend. The club is hosting a fundraiser at Five Guy’s Burgers and Fries on Eddy Street all day Tuesday, Nov. 18, on behalf of the clinic dedicated to serving those in the South Bend community without health insurance.
“As we all know, South Bend winters are no joke, nor are the bouts of flu that sweep the local and student populations,” SJAM co-president junior David Boothe said. “Every year we make flu kits containing things like water and ibuprofen that we donate to the clinic so that the clinic can give them to its underserved patients to help mollify the sometimes debilitating flu symptoms.”
Junior Nick Walter, SJAM co-president, said the club will receive 25 percent of the profits from Five Guy’s customers that specifically state that they are with the SJAM fundraiser. “The flu-kit project is always our most expensive and biggest group donation every year, with a cost of around $600. Our hope is to cover at least half of that cost with this fundraiser,” he said.
Besides the annual flu kit project, Boothe said the club hosts talks from various medical lecturers and organizes movie watches for topical films.
SJAM recently began teaching nutrition classes at the South Bend Center for the Homeless and is currently trying to make volunteer connections with other South Bend medical organizations, Walter said.
“Our mission as a club is to educate our members about social injustices that particularly involve medicine and healthcare," Walter said. "We then also do our part as volunteers in the community to help correct these injustices by helping the underserved in the local South Bend area."
Boothe said the club focuses specifically on how the issues plaguing the American health care system especially affect the underprivileged — the group most likely to be susceptible to the system’s shortcomings.
“The medical system in American is a faulted system … and no matter what walk of life you take, it will affect you in one way or another,” Boothe said. “Through discussion and action, SJAM seeks to spawn the future generations of informed citizens and medical professionals who can make an impact in steering our system to the better.”
SJAM meetings are held every other Thursday at 8 p.m. in LaFortune, with a meeting being held this week. For more information about the club or how to get involved, contact sjam@nd.edu.
