The Public Health Committee in JCC addresses the gap seen in health education and preventative care within underserved populations in the East Bay. Rather than targeting a specific disease area, our committee specifically works to increase education on habit formation, health awareness, and encouraging critical thinking around various public health topics such as nutrition, infectious diseases, and more. Our goal is to empower students with both the knowledge and the skill they can apply to their daily lives, which helps contribute to JCC’s overall mission of helping under-privileged youth and their communities through medical examinations and outreach activities. 

Some of the events we went to last semester were elementary and middle school classroom enrichment, after school programs such as Lotus, and resource fairs. Our events at schools focused on educating the students in the classrooms about better nutrition and sleep by reducing screen time. Our collaboration with Lotus focused on the mothers and their mental health while caring for their children, and it was incredibly beneficial for the mothers to create a safe environment for them to share their experiences. Lastly, our resource fairs focused on running a Tic-Tac-Toe game focused on common public health facts, which allowed students to test their knowledge. 

Other activities that we have focused on this semester were our germ-busting activity where students got to see how germs spread between individuals and objects and our worksheets on building healthy daily routines. Overall, these involvements allow us to spread awareness about important public health topics while simultaneously letting students have fun with the content.