Mohamed Bakri, VISTA’s Man on Campus, Works for Better Health Care for All
Mohamed Bakri
BY BRIAN GILBERT
After decades of impassioned debate leading to no substantive legislation, the epoch of health reform may finally be ready to reverse that trend.
Or so they say in Washington.
Meanwhile, in Northfield, discussion and planning about how to create a ‘healthy community’ is in full stride and shows no sign of slowing as that potential watershed is reached.
Sit down with Mohamed Bakri and he’ll tell you.
Bakri is Carleton’s representative for HealthCorps VISTA (Volunteer In Service to America), a program established by the AmeriCorps National Service Act and signed into action in 1993 by President Clinton. It was further expanded by President George W. Bush in 2003. At Carleton, Bakri works through the college’s Acting in the Community Together (ACT) program.
As VISTA’s campus representative, Bakri works to increase health care access and literacy at the college and throughout Northfield by creating working programs and relationships between college students, faculty and staff and the local community.
‘Growing Up Healthy’
The cross-interest, multi-focused community interactions are part of a process Bakri calls “expanding the surface.” His hope is to unite specialized, diversified interests to form the “larger picture” of a topic often muddled and divided.
Growing Up Healthy, a local non-profit organization, is one project that Bakri works on. The program’s focus is to improve health care options and services for the children of low income families in Rice County.
Bakri and others at Growing Up Healthy believe that often it is not so much the lack of existing health care services that is the problem, but instead the lack of a connection between existing services and the people who need access to them.
Growing Up Healthy aims to close that gap.
Bakri is also working with Carleton College student Carmen Ross, a Carleton senior and political science major, to set up a local youth discussion panel on health care.
“We need to always be talking about these things,” Ross said.
To contact Mohamed Bakri: mbakri@carleton.edu
To contact Brian Gilbert: gilbertb@carleton.edu
Copyright @ 2009 Pressville
