Hello. My name is Sara Green and I am a rising 2nd year MPH student in the Global Health concentration. I grew up in Massachusetts and attended George Washington University in Washington DC for college where I earned a BA in International Affairs with a minor in Arabic. I worked for a refugee resettlement agency for two years after college, where I was a Refugee School Liaison helping kids and parents navigate school in Virginia. I entered the Peace Corps in Morocco in 2018 and was evacuated due to COVID-19 in 2020. I was a Youth Development Volunteer in a small town near Marrakech. After the Peace Corps, I worked as a Contact Tracer for Partners in Health before I moved down to North Carolina to start my MPH. During my first year, I worked with the Humanitarian Health Initiative as an intern on a domestic project at a refugee resettlement agency in Durham.
This summer, for my practicum I am a Populations Health Intern at the Durham County Department of Public Health. I am supporting the health department’s re-accreditation, a process they must go through every four years to get certified by the state. I am also working on projects related to the department’s strategic plan. So far, it has been great to learn more about Durham County and the great work the health department is doing to do outreach to the community. The Population Health department is still relatively new in the health department, and it has been interesting to see how they are growing and using data to help different projects.
Currently, I am working on a Quality Improvement (QI) project for the Family Planning Clinic, creating activities around accreditation to get employees involved, and helping to organize the Health Department’s policies for the accreditation process.
I have been working a mix of in person and telework, and it has been good to get into an office environment again, which makes it a lot easier to interact with my coworkers and bosses. I look forward to the rest of the summer at the health department.
Outside of work, I have been enjoying swimming in Jordan Lake, lifting, and reading.
-Sara G.