Blum Initiative on Global & Regional Poverty
2015-16 Service Learning Fellows
The Blum Initiative’s Service Learning Fellowship supports UCR students interested in pursuing an immersive learning experience by partnering with a poverty-related non-profit or agency. Students complete at least 150 hours in the field over at least 4 consecutive weeks, though most choose to extend their fellowship for the duration of the summer. To-date the Initiative has supported students from engineering, the natural sciences, and the social sciences who have worked with non-profits based in Southern California, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Uganda.
Heajin (Sarah) Kim
MPP Candidate | School of Public Policy
Sarah is a first year Master of Public Policy Student at UC Riverside. Her interests lie in immigration and social policy. Through the Blum Initiative Service Fellowship, she will volunteer and intern at The Future Foundation of Korea, a non-profit North Korean Refugee service organization based in Seoul, South Korea; she hopes to expand her understanding of the refugee experience and the subsequent consequences of international migration.
Kara Miller
PhD Candidate | Anthropology
Kara is a socio-cultural, medical anthropologist with specific interest in humanistic health and care relationships. Her work takes an emotion-rich, ethnographic approach to understanding medical systems and the lived effects of transglobal health policies. She researches gendered ideologies and the medicalized body through lenses of maternity care and childbirth events in order to contribute to changing discourses in reproductive health. Kara’s Blum-supported project in rural Southern Uganda looks at the ways in which women and mothers manage and navigate precarity, risk, and uncertainty in health care. She examine the government-banned services of local midwives, the keepers of the village and an institution of motherhood. Kara also explores the latest proposed solutions in the medical infrastructure of the area, namely community-run clinics in Bushenyi district and is partnered with the Ishaka Health Plan.
Blake Pollard
PhD Candidate | Physics
Blake is a PhD student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and studies the physics of information. He grew up in south Florida, earned his bachelors in Applied Physics from Columbia University and worked as a researcher in the physics department at the University of Hawai’I at Manoa before starting grad school. He enjoys surfing, hiking and playing the bass. Blake’s service-learning fellowship will find him living and working in rural A-Hmong or Miao villages scattered throughout the mountainous region of southwestern China. His great-grandfather, Samuel Pollard, was a Methodist missionary who, after arriving to China from England in 1888, spent his life working with the Miao people in this region until his death in 1915. In addition to assisting with ongoing development projects in the region, he will visit several villages where Sam Pollard and other missionaries helped to found and administer schools as part of the regional Guanghua school system. Blake will meet with various community leaders to learn more about the current and future state of their educational system and hopes to forge new connections with the people of the region in order to help share their story and culture more broadly.