Cindy Simon

Agency: UA Pima County Cooperative Extension

Term: Spring - 2001

This semester has been enhanced by my opportunity to complete an ICYF internship. I am working through the University of Arizona's Cooperative Extension program. My assignment has been to work specifically with the Community Health Advancement Partnerships (CHAPS) program. This program is targeted at educating the public about improving health behaviors through guest speaker lectures, health classes, and community health programs. CHAPS encourages the people of the community to get involved and be a part of the implementation process; this encourages buy-in to engaging in the proposed health behaviors. CHAPS also attempts to bring community organizations into the process to enlist their financial and social support so that the program can become more visible to the community.

The project that I have been working on with CHAPS is a community walking program in Green Valley. I have been tasked with being a member of two committees; one is the Promoting a Healthy Lifestyle and the other is a Bench Study subcommittee. The purpose of my being on these two committees is to interact with community leaders to get a walking program implemented.

One of the objectives is to place benches in the community to provide resting places for those who need them. Since our project's goal is to get people at risk to engage in more exercise, we need to remove barriers that would prevent them from taking part in the program. The Bench Study committee is working with Pima County and local organizations to fund and place the benches within the community on major streets and in private neighborhoods. My other responsibilities include entering, analyzing, and reporting on data obtained from health surveys completed by area residents to identify current health behaviors and concerns they have. This has allowed me to gain a better insight into the type of people our project will affect.

I am doing this internship because I want to work with aging populations. I enjoy interacting with older people who have done so much for our country. I am planning on doing program planning and evaluation for senior populations after I receive my Ph.D. I want to help improve the quality of life for people as they get older. While we have several programs targeted at this population, many are still needed and some may need improvement. I want to make a positive difference!

I encourage you to get involved in a service learning internship. It will provide you with hands on experience that will benefit someone while helping you to figure out if that is what you really want to do as a career. An internship will allow you to see how much you have really learned! You will really understand how all of those theories you have been learning about come into play as you work with these service organizations.

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