What I learned working at AzHHA

Well, my internship has come to an end and the semester is close to being completed too. I have really enjoyed this semester and have learned a lot both at my internship and in my courses. I went into this semester with positive thoughts of meeting new people as well as my goals.

For my internship specifically I had listed three goals at the beginning which were:

• Identify approaches that effectively motivate voter turnout in upcoming elections
• Build a grassroots network that can be mobilized for public support in future health initiatives
• Conduct and analyze a collection of qualitative interviews to discover health-related affinities within various sub-populations, thereby building empathy between those populations and AzHHA. 

These goals were based on what I had heard the internship would be about and are not specifically centered around my own personal growth but I find I learn the most when I have goals that are product focused and I learn more about myself along the way.

If you haven't been following my blog specifically or you can recall, I have been working at AzHHA, a nonprofit organization as part of a team of 12 interns. Each week we went out into the community and interviewed different types of people, my group focused on people 65+ , and asked those people general healthcare/health related questions.

The first goal was accomplished because I was able to interview so many different people and find out what really mattered to them. I learned that older people are more likely to gain health information via standard mail and from their peers and they really enjoy talking to younger generations, but not so much hearing from younger generations. 

The second goal was also achieved, if you don't know what grassroots networking is it is going into the community and talking to the people, and with each person you meet with you get contact information for another person, essentially building a long chain of people you can call and connect with to talk about a specific issue. In this situation it would be used to talk to people about voting a certain way.

Lastly, my team and I conducted over thirty interviews with each interview lasting about an hour. We found what makes people over 65+ passionate about their health, how they feel about healthcare, and learned best how to communicate with them.

If you would like to view our presentation you can view it here