United to Serve is an annual UT system-wide day of service initiated in 2004, which takes place in April each year. UT-Southwestern's contribution has been to host a day of health and fun for our surrounding community. The tradition continues this year with our fourth annual United to Serve Health and Fun Fair!
Everyone's help is needed in many different areas, so there's sure to be one that interests you! Click Details to learn more about each role, then Sign Up with the link to the right.
- Health Fair (Show/Hide Details or Sign Up)
- Games (Show/Hide Details or Sign Up)
- Registration (Show/Hide Details or Sign Up)
- Medical Museum (Show/Hide Details or Sign Up)
- Other Stuff (Show/Hide Details or Sign Up)
We are looking for a whole bunch of dynamic, enthusiastic folks to explain a variety of health concepts and diseases to the general public. These topics include heart disease, diabetes, sexually transmitted infections, alcoholism, and a whole lot more. Each booth will feature a variety of visual aides to assist in this effort, including computer animations, tables, large posters, and in some cases plastinated diseased organs. A few of the booths will feature screenings of things like body mass index, blood pressure, and blood glucose, and one will require physical exams (the "sports physicals" booth, which is only available to third- and fourth-year medical students and PA students on rotations). A small degree of medical knowledge would be helpful for the people who sign up for these booths, but we will work with you to make sure you know exactly what to say and how to explain it. The most important characteristic of those who sign up for the health fair is a great degree of warmth and enthusiasm for helping the surrounding community. Spanish language skills are TREMENDOUSLY helpful for the health fair.
Every year at United to Serve we have a carnival-type games area so that kids can enjoy themselves during the day. These games take a lot of manpower to pull off and are a lot of fun both for volunteers and the public. Since the kids generally speak English pretty well, Spanish language skills are NOT required for these activities (and in fact, if you speak Spanish, we could REALLY use your help at either the health fair or the registration area, so we hope you'll consider signing up for one of those areas instead).
Once folks come to United to Serve, they will be able to play games, check out the health fair, get a tour through the medical museum, and sign up for raffles and other prizes. We like to have a few people on hand right at the entrance to guide people to where they need to go, and a few more people to give out health fair registration cards. Spanish speakers are especially helpful for this area.
A fun section of the health fair designed especially for the kids, the medical museum will feature a set of interactive exhibits about how the body works. Features include X-rays, 3D photography (where kids can take home their own 3D photos!), and a station where kids can isolate DNA. This promises to be great fun for volunteers, whom we hope will be very excited about explaining basic physiology to the public. A few Spanish speakers would be nice for this area too. If you don't think you can adequately explain these sorts of physiology concepts to the kids, don't worry; we'll tell you exactly how to do it in advance. We just hope to find people who are genuinely excited about interacting directly with kids.
As we get closer to the event we will add other jobs that don't really fit into the categories listed above. For example, these might include photographers to go around and take nice pictures on the day of the event, or it might feature people to help hand out food during lunch if we can find a donor to make that happen. At any rate, check back on this page frequently to see what else we might have in store for you.