Students Educating and Volunteering for Health Awareness (SEVHA) was established in 1997 at the University of Michigan by a group of four friends who wanted to make a difference in their community. They knew that they wanted to do something more than a one-time fundraiser or community service event. They wanted to do something that would far outlast their own time at the university and that would continue to have an impact long after they’d moved on. It was with this ideology in mind that the founders created SEVHA.
In searching for a way to give back the founders continually stumbled upon India’s alarming rates of tobacco use. While use of tobacco was an ebbing problem in the United States it was growing exponentially in India. The Indian government was trying to make strides, but with India’s already alarming rates of oral cancer, the government’s actions alone would not be enough. The founders set out to derive a plan to help. They would aim their efforts at the grassroots, talking personally with children in India to warn them about the harmful effects of tobacco use. Furthermore, they would try and mobilize the children themselves to educate their communities. They realized that education was not a limited quantity, and that educating a few could have a tremendous ripple effect on communities as a whole. And thus, SEVHA, the Hindi word for service, was created, aimed at living up to its name.
SEVHA has grown significantly over the past decade, developing into one of the largest South Asian organizations on the University of Michigan campus. In spite of this growth SEVHA remains a close knit-group, realizing that with growth comes added responsibility and remains intensely focused on ways to increase awareness both domestically and internationally. As the organization grew from four to twenty, SEVHA took on the task of providing tobacco education to the University campus as a whole. As the organization grew further, SEVHA took on the responsibility of educating the campus community and Indian school children on the causes and affects of HIV and AIDS.
Today SEVHA has thirty-three members, more than eight times what it started with a decade ago, working domestically and internationally on tobacco and HIV/AIDS awareness. In only ten years SEVHA has created contacts with some of the world’s most influential public health organizations, has reached out to over 50,000 children and has impacted a countless number of lives. As SEVHA continues to grow, it will undoubtedly continue to affect lives and empower youth to make more educated choices. |
