Author: Marisa Landicho

A week after a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit the island country of Haiti, several on-campus groups have their fundraising machines up and running. Coordinating these efforts, the ASSU Executives, in conjunction with Partners in Health (PIH), unveiled a nationwide college fundraising challenge on Sunday night in an e-mail to the student body.

With the announcement, the ASSU is joining the ranks of the nonprofit FACE AIDS, Stanford’s School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital and Clinics and Dance Marathon in raising funds for relief efforts.

“We thought the best way to get the most people involved is through a competition across the country,” said ASSU President David Gobaud. “We thought if we set up a dashboard to track donations between universities, it would motivate more people.”

So far, seven schools, including UC-Berkeley and Caltech, have signed onto the ASSU-led challenge, which will run through Wednesday. The ASSU is also running another challenge between dorms and residences on Stanford’s campus.

In total, participating universities have raised over $40,000, including around $10,000 from Stanford and $27,000 from Dartmouth, who began their challenge a day earlier, on Saturday.

Temporarily, the money donated to Stanford’s campaign is being redirected to FACE AIDS, who announced Saturday that they will match dollar-for-dollar any funds raised by chapters nationwide, up to $50,000. The FACE AIDS amount is being matched through a donation from Sterling Stamos, a private investment firm.

As of press time, FACE AIDS has raised $22,220, much of the funds coming from Stanford University, according to FACE AIDS Executive Director Julie Veroff ‘07.

Founded by Stanford students in 2005 and based in Palo Alto, FACE AIDS has chapters in more than 200 universities and high schools across the nation. Though their primary focus is to fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Rwanda, Veroff said the magnitude of the crisis in Haiti demanded action.

“We felt that as a group of young people passionate about global health and social issues, [the Haiti earthquake] was something we could not ignore,” she said.

Veroff hoped that this challenge would also be a way for more young people to become involved in global issues. High school chapter leaders will be holding awareness events, such as movie screenings, in the coming weeks.

Both the money donated to FACE AIDS and the ASSU will go toward PIH’s Haiti earthquake relief and reconstruction efforts.

Founded in 1987, PIH is a health care nonprofit that operates in ten countries and provides medical care to poor communities. With over 20 years of experience in Haiti, PIH operates nine hospitals in the country, along with a triage center recently set up for earthquake victims.

Also working with the ASSU is Dance Marathon, the annual Stanford fundraiser that donates the majority of its proceeds to PIH’s efforts in Rwanda. In light of the earthquake, the Dance Marathon coordinators have removed earmarks from the event this year, allowing PIH to utilize funds wherever needs are most pressing.

“We spoke with Partners In Health and our first reaction was, ‘Let’s change beneficiaries completely’ and give 100 percent of what we get to Haiti, but PIH asked us specifically not to do that,” said Dance Marathon Campus Director Bill Loundy ‘10. Dance Marathon gives a reliable sum of money every year to Rwanda, and PIH wanted to maintain that, according to Loundy.

In an e-mail to Dance Marathon participants, however, he said PIH will most likely still use the Dance Marathon donations in Rwanda.

“We’ve encouraged those who want to give directly to Haiti in a time sensitive way to go through the ASSU,” he said.

Other groups helping the ASSU with outreach efforts include the Caribbean Students Association (CSA) and the Student Red Cross.

Stanford School of Medicine, Department of Medicine and Stanford Hospital and Clinics is running a separate fundraising effort, announced Thursday, Jan. 14. The Hospital will match up to $25,000, with funds going to the Hopital Albert Schweitzer (HAS) in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince.

Individuals have also been motivated to raise funds on their own.

Timothy Tam ’12, a member of the Stanford cycling team, is also offering to fix students’ bikes for $5 to $10, with proceeds going to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

Donating money remains the best way for people to provide assistance to Haiti earthquake victims, said Patricia Arty ’10, who has family in Haiti. Arty is the development director for FACE AIDS and the public relations executive for Dance Marathon.

“What I’ve heard from my relatives is if people could just donate one to two dollars –anything you have–it is a huge help, especially in Haiti,” she said. “A hot meal in Haiti costs 25 cents U.S.

It’s still a stressful situation. Our country has to think about rebuilding all over again,” she added.

Donations through the ASSU Web site can be made at assu.stanford.edu/haiti. Funds for HAS should be donated through hashaiti.org/C1a_w1.html, marking ‘Stanford University School of Medicine’ as the matching organization. Contact Tam for bike repairs at [email protected].

It took one-and-a-half years for Stanford’s 48-member Mental Health and Well-Being (MHWB) Task Force to evaluate campus mental health issues. Addressing these issues is likely to take years more.

More than a year has elapsed since the 88-page MHWB Task Force Report was first released, and the University is still in the information-gathering phase. In that time, “mental health” has become a buzzword, the Wellness Room has sprung up and students seeking counseling have increased, according to Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) Director Ronald Albucher.

Still, tackling the report’s list of 18 wide-ranging recommendations has proven to be a sluggish process. While the MHWB Oversight Committee, the body formed in October 2008 to monitor the report’s implementation, has made gains in certain areas, many of the proposals remain in the discussion stage.

“The Oversight Committee is focusing on qualitative and quantitative measures to assess progress at this point,” wrote MHWB Initiative Project Manager Ralph Castro, also the manager for Health Promotion Services (HPS) Substance Abuse Prevention Program, in an e-mail to The Daily.

“A lot of the year has been building a new framework for looking at the recommendations and gathering information,” said ASSU student representative and Undergraduate Health and Wellness Co-Chair Alisha Tolani ‘10.

The Committee, whose progress can be tracked on its Web site, is comprised of health professionals, faculty members and students, who meet two to three times throughout each quarter. The body is subdivided into three work groups that gather more frequently: Faculty and Academic Initiatives, Education and Outreach, and Policies and Practices.

Quantifying Progress

Against the odds, the Oversight Committee has been able to post several gains.

Many proposals have already solidified: a change in the Academic Calendar aimed to reduce stress, a new course to promote happiness and stress-reduction, the addition of a staff position to mentor first generation and low-income students and the continuance of suicide prevention QPR counseling through CAPS.

Mental health has also become less of a fringe issue, with candidates for student government often making mental health a part of their platforms.

“I think that mental health issues are something that people are becoming more and more aware of, which is great,” wrote undergraduate student committee member Sandra Yen ‘10 in an e-mail to The Daily. “It is not an easy topic to talk about.”

Castro also cited the critical importance of the maintenance of CAPS resources throughout multiple rounds of budget cuts in supporting mental health efforts, as well as the increase of funding to the gradate Community Associate program, which supports graduate students living in on-campus housing.

“We did take a minor hit [in funding], but overall, in terms of clinical time, there was no impact,” Albucher said. “The University really wanted to prioritize staffing and funding for mental health.”

CAPS has undergone the most changes since the formation of the MHWB Task Force in 2006. Using additional funding from the University’s general fund, CAPS hired more staff people, a case management official and a new director — Albucher — in November 2008.

According to Albucher, CAPS currently has 16 full-time equivalent positions, along with three psychology trainees, three psychiatry residents and three child psychiatry fellows.

With the increase in personnel, CAPS also shifted focus to raising intake capabilities.

“Our goal for most students is to get them in within a week’s time of first contact,” Albucher said. After an initial screening, CAPS will then refer the student to the appropriate service if necessary.

CAPS has been succeeding in achieving this goal. According to case intake data from October 2009, 84 percent of students were seen by a clinician within a week of contacting CAPS. Reasons for the 16 percent of delays included students’ requesting specific therapists and scheduling conflicts. In one to two percent of cases, CAPS was unable to identify a reason for the delay.

In the past year, there has been a 10 percent increase in requests for counseling and a 30 percent increase in requests for medication evaluation and medication management, according to Albucher. Every week, CAPS receives between 50 and 60 requests for new evaluations — the same rate Albucher told The Daily in November of 2008.

CAPS services, from triage to intake to counseling, are provided free of charge to students, paid for by the Vaden health service fee instituted fall quarter.

Due to resource constraints, however, CAPS is unable to offer long-term counseling for most students.

“Under Review”

But not every initiative has met with success.

For many of the recommendations, the current progress merely reads, “Under review,” and the Web site does not include updates from the 2009-10 academic year.

Tolani defended the pace of the changes. “We’re checking in frequently enough — I think [the outreach working group] had four to five meetings last quarter — and we’re going as fast as we can, keeping in mind faculty schedules,” she said.

“Though there doesn’t seem to be a concrete deadline, the Oversight Committee is holding to a tight deadline,” she added.

Part of the difficulty stems from the lack of a single, proven solution for improving mental health. According to Yen, the Oversight Committee has also been looking at how other universities are combating the same issues.

“I think the biggest problem is that there is still a lot of stigma and people are afraid to talk about it because they are afraid how their peers will respond,” said ASSU Undergraduate Health and Wellness Co-Chair Jen Hawkins ’11.

“Often, CAPS sounds like a good idea to students until it comes time that they are the ones who need it,” added committee member and Earth Systems Prof. Julie Kennedy.

Student Involvement

If all else fails, the lasting contribution of the MHWB task force may be the collaboration between groups working to support and raise awareness for mental health issues. In particular, cooperation between Vaden, HPS, CAPS and student initiatives is on an upward swing, according to Tolani and Hawkins.

Student groups like Stanford Peace of Mind, the Stanford Theater Activist Mobilization Project, the Bridge Peer Counseling Center and Project Love, along with the Wellness Room, are all targeted at raising student awareness and de-stigmatizing the issue. These groups often work with CAPS and HPS, bringing clinicians into dorms and hosting panels. Personal accounts of students who have sought counseling are some of the most effective methods of outreach, say Hawkins and Kennedy.

The ASSU will be hosting a wellness week in February, bringing together various student organizations and formal health services to promote mental health.

“We want to stress that taking positive steps in addressing mental illness is really a sign of strength,” Tolani said.

Updates on the progress of the MHWB Oversight Committee can be found on its Web site, www.stanford.edu/group/mhwb/.

Laurel Price Jones became the associate vice president for medical development and alumni affairs for the Stanford School of Medicine on Jan. 1. Prior to coming to Stanford, Price Jones served as the vice president for development and alumni affairs at George Washington University. She has worked in the development offices at Rochester Institute of Technology, the University Hospital of Cleveland and Oberlin College.

Stanford Daily (SD): What are the differences between fundraising for general purposes versus fundraising for a medical school?

Laurel Price Jones (LPJ): You’re never really raising money just for general purposes. But medicine does have a unique appeal because there’s hardly anyone in the world who isn’t affected by health care issues . . . Pretty much, the vast majority of people think that medicine is important. Hence all the attention on health care. That makes fundraising for medicine an especially satisfying thing to do because a wide variety of people are interested in supporting it for a wide variety of reasons. It’s a straightforward appeal to people’s interests.

SD: What are the actual funding sources for the Stanford School of Medicine?

LPJ: Well, pretty much the same as they are for the rest of the University. Individuals are by far a large source for any institution, and usually we include in that foundations because foundations are usually set up by individuals . . . There are also corporations, but the vast majority of support comes from individuals.

SD: How is fundraising different now than it was five years ago, with the economic downturn?

LPJ: I think there are some signs that things are turning up. We’re certainly ahead of where we were last year. It looks like it’s going to be a good year. I think the worst — in fundraising terms — period was last spring. So, I don’t want to be too predictive because you never know what is going to happen, but I think people are more confident.

SD: What are the main challenges in raising funds for the School of Medicine and other institutions that you have been a part of in the past?

LPJ: There aren’t any. [laughs] You just have to go to work. I don’t know Stanford well enough to say whether there are particular challenges here, but in general there are always people who are philanthropic, who want to do something beyond what they can do themselves. I mean that’s the whole point of making a big gift. The main challenge is to learn from people what their interests are and whether they lend themselves to philanthropic support and then find a good match at the institution. If you can do that, then you have a robust fundraising program. You don’t have to do that with every individual you meet, just with whom it’s important.

SD: In your fund raising efforts, are individual donors able to donate to specific programs versus a multi-purpose fund?

LPJ: Of course. That’s the reason they give. Sometimes people will make loyalty gifts and say, “Use it wherever you want,” but the big gifts that transform an institution — and Stanford has had many of those over the years, which is why it is such an outstanding university — are to endow specific programs. I think if there is anything that has changed in the last 10 years or more are people are more and more interested in being more involved in their own giving. People are more directive now than they were 10 or 15 years ago.