MMS and Alliance Charitable Foundation: 2007-2008 Grants

Download a summary of the grants (.pdf, 56.6 KB, 2 pages)

Community Action

Eldercare Alliance – $15,000
To support the establishment of a hospital-based training program, at Boston University Geriatric Services of Boston Medical Center, for health-care providers and mandated reporters for recognizing, reporting on, and responding to elder abuse, including self neglect.

Families for Depression Awareness – $10,000
To support the Teen Depression and Suicide Prevention Program, focusing on the middle and high school districts of Chelsea, Revere, Lynn, Medford, and Arlington. Schools will be provided with, and receive training on the use of, a wellness guide for parents of children and teens with depression or bipolar disorder. At-risk students are also provided with their own wellness guide. In addition, targeted clinicians in the stated towns will receive the informational guides and training.

Leominster Multi-Service Center – $10,000
To support the Preventive Health Program, which provides personal health screening and community-based health education and referrals to the low-income, medically underserved residents in 23 target communities.

REACH – $5,000
To support the REACHing Teen Voices project, which provides culturally competent education and outreach around dating violence to middle school, high school, college-aged youth, and associated adults. REACH also supports community change efforts to end dating violence and provides supportive services to survivors of dating violence.

Transition House – $5,000
To support the Dating Violence Intervention Program, which provides outreach and education to middle school and high school students in Cambridge and Somerville who are currently victims, or at-risk of becoming victims of violence, through the provision of individual and group clinical counseling.

Wayside Multi-Service Center – $10,000
To enhance the Student Assistance Program at the Watertown Middle and High Schools to address the documented need for culturally appropriate crisis intervention and support to promote healthy decision making around youth risk behavior including: lifestyle choices, family and interpersonal violence, sexual harassment, suicidal ideation, self-injurious behaviors, and alcohol/drug use and abuse.

Care for the Medically Underserved

Community Health Center of Cape Cod – $25,000
To support the Diabetes Initiative for the Uninsured, a program which has been in place since 2006 that provides a continuum of services to identify uninsured adults with untreated diabetes and/or poorly controlled diabetes, and to significantly improve health outcomes of diagnosed individuals through treatment, education, and monitoring.

Sharewood Project – $12,500
To expand urgent and primary healthcare services offered by volunteer medical students, at the Malden clinic, which provides care to the underserved population of Greater Boston; and to increase undergraduate participation and involvement.

VIM Berkshire – $20,000
To support the volunteer healthcare professionals and clinical staff at the health center by expanding their broad case management program, which provides coordination of care and services, for the complex problems of the medically uninsured in Berkshire County.

Women of Means – $10,000
To extend clinical and educational access to homeless women and their children in the Boston area by increasing the nursing and physician presence in the family shelters served; while also taking on a greater number of trainees to expand the program further.

OTHER

The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship – $25,000
To support the Boston Schweitzer Fellows Program, one of nine such programs in the U.S. The Fellows Program supports students in medicine and other health professions who are engaged in community service projects that promote health and improve access to health care for underserved populations.

Mid-Year Progress Report- January 2009

Lambaréné Schweitzer Fellowship – $5,000
To provide support to a senior year medical student at the University of Massachusetts Medical School to spend three months working as a Fellow at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon on clinical rotations. John Stenglein will work as a junior physician, supervised by Schweitzer Hospital medical staff, from May 1 through July 31, 2008.

Massachusetts Medical Benevolent Society - $85,000
To provide financial assistance to physicians in need who are being treated for substance related disorders and mental health issues.

INTERNATIONAL HEALTH STUDIES

Camellia Banerjee
A second-year medical student at Boston University School of Medicine who will study the effects of maternal malaria on fetal birth weight and newborn health in the malaria-endemic area of Chhattisgargh, India.

Monica Campo-Patino, M.D.
A second-year internal medicine resident at Tufts New England Medical Center who will detect patients who are at high risk for becoming nonadherent to Direct Observed Therapy, and address the factors that stopped them from continuing these courses at primary care centers and TB clinics in Cali, Columbia.

Tarayn Alessandra Fairlie, M.D.
A first-year pediatric resident at Baystate Medical Center who, alongside local providers in Maputo, Mozambique, will provide prophylactic anti-retroviral treatment for children exposed prenatally to HIV, and will assist clinic staff with surveillance for nutritionally and developmental abnormalities.

Shira Fischer
A third-year medical student at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who will work within the public health sector, looking at care delivery and social context for women who live in the Eastern Cape Province of the Republic of South Africa.

Ilse R. Levin, M.D.
A second-year internal medicine resident at Baystate Medical Center who, alongside physicians in general medicine, will provide care to adults in both the hospital and the rural clinic settings of Papua, New Guinea. Additionally, she will work with chief hospital administrators to study how public health programs are implemented despite the number of obstacles in reaching the general population.

Thanh-Nga T. Tran, M.D.
A third-year dermatology resident, volunteering with the Vietnam CDC Harvard Medical School AIDS Partnership in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam who will establish an educational program for local physicians about dermatologic manifestations of HIV. Additionally, she will identify, research, and report challenging cases for further education, in an attempt to provide overall better care to patients.

Olga Valdman
A fourth-year medical student at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who will develop a portable medical record to be used by mobile clinics and medical facilities serving the Haitian sugar can workers and their families living in the area of La Romana, Dominican Republic.