When junior Morissa Sobelson began planning a forum designed to spread the word about health disparities in America, she had few expectations; she would have been happy to bring together 75 people and use a single slide projector.
But her ideas appealed to the community far more than she could have anticipated.
The Health Disparities and Higher Education Symposium, an all-day event held Saturday in Cabot, attracted over 400 registrants, 30 volunteers and 20 panelists and speakers.
The event served to raise awareness about health disparities among different portions of the population - specifically in the Boston area - and identify ways that the college population can solve them. It also formed the foundation for a long-term initiative headed by the Health Disparities Student Leadership Committee, a newly-developed intercollegiate group.
"The hope is that this group could really begin to take a lot of the momentum that [was] formed [Saturday] and say, 'What can we actually do?'" Sobelson said. "We have to recognize our responsibilities as students and as institutions."
Sobelson, along with junior Kate Cohen and sophomore Alice Tin, began preparing for the event in the spring and continued through the summer, reaching out to other universities, medical institutions and the community at large.
The idea generated a lot of interest from health professionals, as the focus has only recently begun to receive attention on a broader level.
"It's a somewhat new topic to begin with," Sobelson said. "Health disparities are interesting, because they make us really look at health and issues of inequality in a way that is sometimes very uncomfortable for people - and some of that was acknowledged [Saturday].
"We have to be talking about issues of race and gender and sexuality and immigration in a very real way," she continued. "You can't really beat around the bush when it comes to what's actually causing all the disparities."
Not only did the event broach a prevalent yet relatively novel topic, but it also looked at it from the perspective of higher education, a twist that grabbed the attention of health professionals in the Boston area, Sobelson said.
While the symposium ultimately focused on actively bridging the existing gap in health and health care, the initial vision was not nearly so ambitious. Originally, the group planned the event to simply raise awareness, but eventually realized that this was not enough to induce change.
"I spent the summer working on it, and I met one of our speakers, Dr. Kalahn Taylor-Clark, and she basically stopped me in my tracks," Sobelson said. "She said ... 'I think this is a really great idea; I think you're really committed, passionate, but raising awareness isn't enough. It's simply not enough.'"
So the three organizers found a new way to structure the event, hoping to both introduce the basic inequities and devise ways to tackle the issues. After a series of keynote addresses and a panel in the morning, the symposium shifted gears in the afternoon, breaking into a series of discussion sessions focused on brainstorming the ways in which higher education can utilize its resources to reach out to the community and bridge healthcare gaps.
"We wanted a forum to bring together speakers and experts and students and community members," Tin said. "We really wanted to emphasize the community aspect and also the action piece of it. We don't want people to come and talk about it and not leave with anything concrete."
The Health Disparities Student Leadership Committee, which will keep the conversation going, hopes to expand its membership base to 15 or 20 students from Boston-area institutions and meet monthly so participants can bring ideas back to their home universities.
Currently, the committee comprises eight students from Tufts, Harvard and Cambridge College.
"All of us in it are college students or graduate students in some capacity, and we believe that gives us incredible access to resources, ... information [and] just a lot of power," Cohen said. "As we talked about in a lot of the panels [Saturday], change really comes from grassroots places, and there's no one better to sort of promote change, to catalyze change than passionate young people."
