What are you up to?

[Admin]

Take a moment to debrief to your other group members about what Team HBV is doing at your high school.

[CHSmich]

Here is a copy of our debrief, which is basically what we have been doing!

TEAM HBV at Canyon High School
My name is Michelle Kwon, and I am currently the president and founder of the TEAM HBV chapter at Canyon High School. I actually first became aware of Hepatitis B because I attended the 7th Annual Pacific Islander Youth Leadership Conference. It really was an amazing experience to actually get to know about the disease and to create actual ways we could really spread the message and motives of the Jade Ribbon Campaign.
After the conference, I was really eager to make a difference so I started this club off last year with four other people: Yesl Lee, Akiko Shimizu, Nicole Villamin, and Eric Hsieh. We had a good kick start at club carnival, getting around 80 people to sign up. We were able to gather 40-50 people to the first meeting. Then, we had board interviews and had around 20 applicants. We narrowed it down to Sahar Zargar as our secretary, Ivy Zheng as our event coordinator, and Mark Hsu as our web coordinator/designer.
Our first event was a movie event. We showed only half of the documentary “Another Life” and had a question-answer time after the first half. Then we showed an entertaining movie. We also did an event in December that was called Holiday Card Making. About 10 of us gathered at my house to make over 60 Christmas cards for the cancer patients at Kaiser Hospital. We weren’t allowed to distribute the cards in person, but we got an email back from the volunteer manager that the patients got them successfully! Also, we had a Yogurtland event in February. Anyone who went to Yogurtland and bought frozen yogurt using one of our HBV flyers contributed 10 percent of their payment to our club. Unfortunately, we planned a bad day to do it because it was raining, but we gathered a decent amount considering the conditions. That amount was able to fund the T-shirts that were created by Akiko and we were able to distribute them out.
Throughout the year, we had a soda tab collecting event. We wanted to collect soda tabs because they are easy and they can provide funds to the club. Last year, we were able to collect over 2000.
The club began to die down after that event and I personally have to take responsibility for the disintegration. We didn’t have a lot of events/meetings during the second semester. We actually were going to execute a May Hepatitis B Awareness Week but I poorly managed the time and kept pushing it back.
Looking back, I think it was a decent start to the CHS TEAM HBV club, but obviously it was not as active as it could have been. That is why this year, we are planning to have at least one meeting and event per month. For example, in the month of October we had the club carnival (getting around 80 people to sign up again). We have around 30-40 people who have become official members of the club including us. I’m happy that most of them are underclassmen because then we have a good support for the years to come when we are no longer in high school. In October, we had two meetings. One was an introduction meeting and the other was a meeting for those who wanted to participate in the Halloween event. For the Halloween event, we asked people to pass around Hepatitis B Information flyers while trick-or-treating and sign petitions saying that they have received this flyer. Whoever got the most signatures would win In-n-out. Although around 15 people showed up, only 2 people turned the petitions in which was a slight disappointment. But it was fine because we at least got word out. For November, we talked about a College B Here Tour which occurred last week at UCSD and UCLA. Basically, this event was sponsored by GiLead and it featured an art exhibition and a concert featuring different Asian American singers. We had the November meeting yesterday, and we talked about the mini board interviews. We wanted to create a mini board to create an HBV legacy that would continue on while we leave high school. 11 people signed up, and we had the first interviews today. We had fun interviewing four people today during lunch. During December, we picked the new future-mini board and created over 50 holiday cards for Kaiser patients. For the rest of December, we have a movie night and a plushie making/ chocolate making event. For other events, we plan to create lectures and speak to fellow Canyon high school students during their freshmen seminar classes and health classes about Hepatitis B and the facts/statistics they should keep in mind. In addition, we want to participate in some kind of Asian festival and spread awareness using a booth.
We would also like to create a legitimate Hepatitis B Awareness Week. It really is difficult to get people to care about Hepatitis B, which is one of the things that saddens me. I would like to create a solid high school chapter here at CHS that will make students aware of this disease and actually care.