Horseshoe Community Health Fellowship

Award recipients

Quick facts

Description

Project Horseshoe Farm works to provide a community-based model for the healthcare and education needs of vulnerable communities; adopting models of social entrepreneurial efforts initiated by community-based service leaders. This is a volunteer service fellowship. Launched in the Summer of 2009, the Horseshoe Farm Community Health Fellowship is a pioneering attempt to rethink and provide a new model for how to prepare our most promising future community-based service leaders in medicine and healthcare to lead effective grassroots community-based efforts in their own communities once they have completed their education and training. Students preparing for careers in medicine or healthcare as well as other students with strong leadership potential are invited to commit one year (13 months) to one of the three communities that Project Horseshoe Farm serves. Fellows are challenged to learn about and become engaged in the community as they are immersed in almost all phases and aspects of the development, management, and leadership of, and service in the programs of Project Horseshoe Farm. To further help prepare Fellows for leadership roles amid the complex systems they will likely face, Fellows are introduced through readings and discussions to topics including community involvement and engagement, an introduction to health care systems, management and leadership of non-profit organizations, health care law and ethics, health care economics, the structure and financing of the health care system, the history of American medicine, and health policy. Taken as a whole, the Fellowship is intended to provide a rich and textured experience that will help prepare some of our most promising future leaders of healthcare and medicine to provide leadership in service to their communities and potentially to develop innovative community-based solutions to the problems facing the broader healthcare system.