Introduction

I was an intern at Family Tree Clinic in Saint Paul, Minnesota for the fall semester of 2019. Family Tree’s mission is to “cultivate healthy communities”; they offer sexual education services for people of all ages, sexual/reproductive health care, and hormone replacement therapy. Their definition of community health is rooted in empowerment through access and knowledge. They train health care providers using an informed consent model, which prioritizes the patient’s understanding of their own health and bodies. The services offered at the clinic are all available under a sliding-scale fee model, which means that no patient is turned away because they are uninsured or cannot cover medical fees, and people with lower incomes will have lower fees. They train volunteers to become MNSure navigators to help patients figure out billing and insurance difficulties. Through my internship I saw that the clinic is constantly brainstorming and initiating new ways to make health services more accessible under current conditions.

My role

As an intern, I mostly worked on projects relating to their Family Planning & STI/HIV hotline. I helped organize resources used for training new hotline staff, and vetted/gathered new materials to expand the breadth of topics covered in these training resources. My biggest project was compiling resources related to adoption in and around the Twin Cities. The document I compiled was added to the resources available to the hotline staffers that are shareable with hotline inquirers. I also helped staff a variety of tabling and fundraising events, where I had the opportunity to network with public health professionals, medical providers, and many young people/students with similar interests as mine.

Takeaways

Volunteering at Family Tree Clinic was an incredible opportunity for me as a Community and Global Health concentrator because it familiarized me with a myriad of career opportunities that, in a general sense, relate to public health. I’d especially recommend it to pre-health folks that are feeling uncertain about their post-graduation options. The clinic prioritized my learning as an intern, and allowed me to shadow professionals working on both the medical side and the “business” side of the clinic. Through informal conversations and shadowing I became more familiar with the scope of practice and educational requirements of nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives, registered nurses, clinic assistants, lab technicians, and family practice physicians. I also gained a deeper understanding of non-profit fundraising and organizational management, and learned about the various jobs in sexual education, volunteer coordination, resource dispensing (i.e. hotline staffing) and clinic management (i.e. front desk jobs).

My own career goals were clarified just by spending time in a mission-based clinic whose ideals lined up with my own. My work at Family Tree helped solidify my desire to become a nurse practitioner after Macalester, but at the same time helped me relax into the idea of working for a few years before applying for nursing school. I learned there are lots of non-profit health jobs that could help build my understanding of health care systems from a non-medical perspective. In fact, there are plenty of recent Mac graduates doing just that at Family Tree!