The annual health fair was a success. It was such a pleasure to assist Cescily with her project. I’ve been to health fairs before and it’s always A LOT going on – it’s really busy, people are everywhere, you can barely hear the words coming out of your own mouth. But being on the opposite side of things and having a different vantage point allowed me to appreciate all of the work that goes into these types of events.
One thing I loved about this event is that people from all over Detroit (and we know that Detroit is huge) came out to the health fair, not only people from the areas surrounding The Villages of Parkside. That goes to show just how much of an impact our health fair had on the community and also on Detroit at large. I appreciate the work and support of all the vendors, as well as their willingness to come out to share and talk about their services with everyone. As I walked around and introduced myself to everyone, I was amazed at some of the services and companies out there because I had no idea they existed. There was a vendor giving away free cell phones, another vendor teaching about different common sicknesses such as AIDS and diabetes, and yet another vendor talking about how they help our environment.
From my work here, I’ve learned that some people are misinformed or uninformed, or don’t have access to health care and information in regards to healthcare. We talked about how we would determine whether the health fair is successful or not – what constitutes as successful? I deemed the health fair successful according to how many people actually got useful and beneficial information from the vendors. We used the incentive of allowing our guests to enter a raffle if the visited at least ten vendors, and of course we had a system to track this. However, I could tell from this and the fact that people did not stop at ten vendors, that the health care was a success. They wanted to ask questions and they wanted to hear what organizations had to say and they listened. Sounds like a success story to me.
