About United To Serve
United to Serve is an annual UT system-wide day of service initiated in 2004, which takes place in April each year. UT Southwestern's contribution has been to host a day of health and fun for our surrounding community. The tradition continues this year with our seventh annual United to Serve Health and Fun Fair! Everyone's help is needed in many different areas, so there's sure to be one that interests you! Below you'll find a bit of backround information for each component - when you're ready, visit our sign-up page!
Health Fair
We are looking for a whole bunch of dynamic, enthusiastic folks to explain a variety of health concepts and diseases to the general public. These topics include heart disease, diabetes, sexually transmitted infections, alcoholism, and a whole lot more. Each booth will feature a variety of visual aides to assist in this effort, including computer animations, tables, large posters, and in some cases plastinated diseased organs. A few of the booths will feature screenings of things like body mass index, blood pressure, and blood glucose, and one will require physical exams (the "sports physicals" booth, which is only available to third- and fourth-year medical students and PA students on rotations). A small degree of medical knowledge would be helpful for the people who sign up for these booths, but we will work with you to make sure you know exactly what to say and how to explain it. The most important characteristic of those who sign up for the health fair is a great degree of warmth and enthusiasm for helping the surrounding community.
Spanish language skills are extremely helpful for the health fair!
Games
The Games/Carnival part of the Health Fair is where the kids at the fair can come and play during the day! There are two main sections: Arts and Crafts & Carnival Games. Arts and Crafts includes a variety of activities indoors where kids can make fun crafts, get their faces painted, get balloon animals made, etc. Carnival Games is where the kids can use their game tickets from registration to play carnival-style games for tickets and trade them in for prizes at the Prizes Booth. There is also a big Moonbounce that the kids can enjoy. If you like hanging out with kids of all ages, this is a great volunteer opportunity for you! You can sign up for the general Crafts group or the general Games group, and we will assign people to the different games and craft tables on the morning of the event. If you have special skills in facepainting or balloon animal making, please sign up for Crafts and send an email here so we can take advantage of your special skills!
Medical Museum
A fun section of the health fair designed especially for the kids, the medical museum will feature a set of interactive exhibits about how the body works. Features include X-rays, 3D photography (where kids can take home their own 3D photos!), and a station where kids can isolate DNA. This promises to be great fun for volunteers, whom we hope will be very excited about explaining basic physiology to the public. A few Spanish speakers would be nice for this area too. If you don't think you can adequately explain these sorts of physiology concepts to the kids, don't worry; we'll tell you exactly how to do it in advance. We just hope to find people who are genuinely excited about interacting directly with kids.
Registration
Once folks come to United to Serve, they will be able to play games, check out the health fair, get a tour through the medical museum, and sign up for raffles and other prizes. We like to have a few people on hand right at the entrance to guide people to where they need to go, and a few more people to give out health fair registration cards. Spanish speakers are especially helpful for this area.
Other
As we get closer to the event we will add other jobs that don't really fit into the categories listed above. For example, these might include photographers to go around and take nice pictures on the day of the event, or it might feature people to help hand out food during lunch if we can find a donor to make that happen. At any rate, check back on this page frequently to see what else we might have in store for you.
