One insight I gained from cleaning the Elizabeth River Trail was how much trash can accumulate along trails and waterways. We collected various types of plastic material, from bottles to bags to wrapping. It contextualizes how much plastic waste is out in the environment. It is one thing to hear and read statistics from lectures and studies but witnessing it firsthand cements it for me. The scale of the problem is hard to comprehend unless you go out and see for yourself.
Another insight is there should be more trash receptacles along the trail and that we should invest more in waste management. Trash cans fill up quickly and there needs to be a person who empties them. If we do not have workers to empty trash cans and clean up trash, garbage can accumulate in the environment easier. It solidifies the concept of One Health and how interconnected everything is.
This experience can provide interesting information to public and global health researchers and practitioners. We recorded the type of trash collected and how much of each. This data is part of the yearly International Coastal Cleanup. The data collected can provide researchers and practitioners with insights into coastal health. The organizers of this event remarked that they had more people show up than expected. Some people even said they wanted to come back and bring more people. These were residents from civilians to Navy sailors that volunteered for a few hours. Researchers and practitioners can use everyday people’s enthusiasm to help improve public and global health. It is not such a far-fetched concept to include the public as an active partner. People are busy and have existing commitments, but if you work with their schedules to include them as active partners, they will rise to the occasion. Why work harder, when you work smarter and increase your reach with the public as team members? Public health is something you do with the public, not to the public.
This service-learning experience has influenced my personal skills. I had fun talking and getting to know my cleanup partner while we hunted for trash. My networking skills improved by emailing the organizers about data and more cleanup opportunities. They have shown interest in assisting me with future data analysis work even. It was a low-stakes situation that helped me work on the people side of public health and I am excited to work with the public more.
This experience has changed my ability to relate to other people in the same way that lifting weights changes your ability to be strong. My people skills are good, but the pandemic and social distancing have atrophied them. It was nice to be around people and talk about different topics with no pressure. It was a social skill workout that showed me my strengths and weaknesses of me, post-start of social distancing.
Service learning is good when paired with classroom learning. Classroom learning can guide service learning and make the experience more effective. Service learning helps solidify concepts you’ve learned and helps you adjust what to take from the classroom and apply it to the conditions you’re in. Classroom learning is theory and service learning is action, when combined you put theory into action for improved public health outcomes. Knowledge is no good unless you apply it!
There is so much opportunity to turn this service-learning experience into a community-based research project. Keep Norfolk Beautiful, part of the Norfolk Department of Public Works coordinated the cleanup event in Norfolk across eight to eleven locations. You could work with the city of Norfolk to keep data on these cleanup sites and analyze trends over time. You could organize more frequent cleanups with the public. So not only are you collecting solid data, but you are also putting public health knowledge into action, including the public as active members and citizen scientists, and making the city a better place to be in. You could further entice people to participate by having a leaderboard for top collectors and making it a competition between cleanup sites. The Student National Environmental Health Association could even run this partnership with the city every year as an ongoing project. This experience is the perfect project to open to community-based research especially since the organizers are so willing and excited to share whatever data they can with me.
Reflection is important because it helps you go over the experience, what was good, what can be better, and how effective the experience was. The experience I had was worth it. I developed my personal and social skills while gaining an improved understanding of the environmental health of my community. The cool part, in my opinion, was that the community came together to serve the community. It reinforces the idea that you cannot separate the public from public health to me. Public health members should be in the community and with the community, not leading from an office ideally. This can be implemented with a feedback survey and a report sent to all participants. Collect feedback from people through online surveys, in-person answers, social media sites, and potentially a phone line. The feedback can be analyzed, and proposals can be sent back to the public to get their thoughts. This can improve the future experience and bypass lengthy meetings that people might not even attend. New updates can be sent to all participants through email, text, and social media posts. People do not like meetings and discussions that could be replaced with a simple email. Streamline the process and make it more accessible to get feedback from everyone to constantly improve.
Service-learning experiences and community-based research are important to global health because you need to put knowledge and theory into action to change anything. You cannot study global health textbook chapters into a healthier world. Public health officials can offer and implement interventions, but it is the public that makes it all work. Global health requires everyone’s action. A lot of people feel powerless to stop climate change and other negative events. By including the public as an active member in global health, it empowers them to realize the 1,000-step journey of global health starts with a single step. The public has the power to improve global health. As more experiences and research starts happening around the world, the opportunities to collaborate open up. It could potentially snowball into a community-building process that makes the world a healthier, more vibrant place to live on.