Inspiring Future Healthcare Professionals
Recognizing that education is a health equity issue, SOS launched a separate education program with its own manager as a spin-off of our local work.
Now, SOS shrinks gaps in educational opportunity and healthcare access in urban and rural communities by helping to educate a new generation of compassionate healthcare workers. We do this by repurposing surplus medical items collected from local healthcare systems and using them to create hands-on, immersive, and standards-based medical career pathway programming targeted primarily to underserved students and low-income or housing-insecure adult learners– reaching over 40,000 students in Kentuckiana every year. Our Education Program also supported the opening of three new medical career pathway schools in South and West Louisville and has partnered with the University of Louisville School of Medicine in creating Saturday “mini med schools” for students from underserved areas.
SOS also inspires hundreds of student volunteers who come through our doors every year through our Global Citizenship and Healthcare Program. This program introduces young people to the hundreds of communities SOS serves and emphasizes the interconnectedness of all human beings– expanding their definition of the word “us.”
Project-Based Learning: The Student-Built Container Clinic
In an incredible example of community collaboration and hands-on learning, SOS partnered with Madisonville North Hopkins High School on a container clinic project that will change lives in Liberia.
When teacher Brian Welch reached out to Education Manager Chanda Fowler with the dream of a student-built container clinic, SOS found a way to support his students in delivering health and hope to the other side of the world. We found a sponsor-- a close international partner and UPS connection who does humanitarian work in Liberia and would cover shipping costs. SOS provided all of the supplies and equipment needed to fully equip the clinic-- including Labor & Delivery bed-- and helped load it for its journey to an impoverished community where medical staff is waiting to get to work. This clinic built by students in rural Kentucky will transform the lives of thousands of people who have never had access to routine medical care.
Our Educational Impact
KY and IN students
KY high schools
Post-secondary students
