Week 8- The first grant program, an excerpt, and a little more

Hi guys! How’s it going? Here’s what’s happening with my project.

The first fund program that I had applied to was from Cisco. This is the $10,000 matching program in which if employees can raise $10,000 for a particular fund, Cisco will match $10,000 and we’d get a total amount of $20,000. Granted, as of right now, we don’t know how much the employees will contribute(If you know Cisco employees, spread the word!!), but I know that there are some seriously special funds actively getting donations at Cisco and their employees are doing great things for their communities!

I thought that I would insert a little abstract of the funding proposal we’ve compiled that we’d submit for whatever grant programs we apply to. Keep in mind that this program only required a short abstract-kind of paragraph and the overall abstract we had for our proposal was modified to be Cisco-specific. Anyways, here goes:

“It seems counterintuitive to create a Medical Mobile Clinic in the Silicon Valley-the center of technological innovation and economic prosperity. However, being in the epicenter of innovation comes with a price. What people may or may not know is that the technological boom actually widens inequality in the Silicon Valley: increasing homeless population, underinsured, uninsured, migrant workers, and dreamers. Access to basic care or primary care has been an increasing challenge.

Solution? A medical mobile clinic with four platforms: continuity of treatment, education, prevention, and research. ABC’s for Global Health is a nonprofit organization founded in 2009 dedicated to providing practical solutions to health problems of disadvantaged and underserved communities across the globe. Focusing on the three principles of advocacy, betterment, and commitment to health and wellness, we aim to bridge health care disparity gaps that exist in Silicon Valley and the world. Leveraging the resources that we have in the Silicon Valley, be it corporations willing to donate to the project or medical and volunteer staff wanting to serve, we should be able to merge science and technology with compassion to make a difference. These funds will help organize a core group to start planning the medical mobile clinic and with the community’s and Stanford’s continued support, we will be on our way to start and sustain a mobile clinic for the underserved, ensuring access to much-needed services.”

That’s the little paragraph thing. Yes, I know it’s long but they’ll change it around however they want. OK, now this grant program aside, I spent this week developed a basic timeline for the project. I have a powerpoint and everything with the amount of money for each service including annual totals, when each task needs to be accomplished from now until the clinic is fully operational, etc. The way we are going, the clinic should be operational by 2020, hopefully by the end of this year. I know, a long way to go. It’s becoming more and more clear the kind of time that needs to go into a project like this and the kind of dedication people need to have for this kind of project to sustain itself. Before we can do anything we need to have the money because the money is what gets us the staff, the bus, the medications, the community organization partnerships, and the credibility. So, for my final paper, it’s going to be a proposal for the clinic, all the grant programs I will have applied to by then, and other things(basically, following the template of a lab report but this isn’t a lab report, if that makes any sense). And, I’ll include all the organizations we’re working with, both from the entire Bay Area and community groups and partnerships from our target location.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading this super long entry. Have a nice day!