Clare Craven
Clare spent five weeks in Rome, Italy studying baroque art and cultural applications to clinical practice. At Duquesne University’s Italian campus, Clare learned about how different cultures receive and react to health care and ventured out into the city and all over Italy to learn of the rich baroque history. After visiting countless churches and museums in Florence, Rome and Naples, her class ventured down to Sicily. The highlight of her time abroad was visiting UPMC’s transplant floor at ISMETT hospital in Palermo. Through this experience with her class she was able to tour the entire hospital and learn about their policies and beliefs in how to take care of patients. It was eye opening to hear of different perspectives. Some key differences were how comfortable the rooms were and that the patients were able to wear their own clothes in order to have more positive outcomes. Coming back to the united states and starting her junior year of nursing school Clare knows she can bring what she learned into her practice back in Pittsburgh. Excited as she is to apply her newfound knowledge, she will deeply miss the friends she made and the city she called home for a month.
CEE Title: The Unfair Truth About Fair Housing
The Truth About Fair Housing was a presentation and panel on what fair housing looks like in Pittsburgh and around the world. We used what we saw in the three countries we studied abroad and applied it to how discrimination effects people’s right to housing in the United States. Unsurprisingly, our crisis was very comparable to the issues in Ghana, Italy and Brazil. At the heart of each country’s main problems with housing was discrimination and economic inequality. Our event was intended to educate Duquesne students about the social injustice that takes place in their very own neighborhood. We invited them to explore how housing has been regulated since the early 1900’s. Housing markets all over the world illegally deny people housing based on their race, color, sex, national origin, religion and even disabilities. Our event detailed the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and we presented on ways in which this act could be violated by landlords and home sellers. We then invited a panel of knowledgeable academics and activists who are prominent in Pittsburgh. These guests answered our facilitated questions about Pittsburgh, specifically Duquesne’s neighbors, Uptown and the Hill District. We hope our audience left with a better understanding of what fair housing truly means and how it is not well regulated so that they can take that information and use it to make more informed decisions and educate others. Regardless if you’re from the area or not, the community becomes your home over the four years of attending college and it is so important to contribute to it so that it can prosper and outgrow the inequity that it faces now.