By: Sahiti Pottlapelli
This summer I have been working with Abortion Care Training Incubator for Outstanding Nurse Scholars (ACTIONS) at UCSF. ACTIONS is a fellowship program focused on connecting and supporting students who want to pursue a PhD at the School of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. For the next three years the program has set up funding for scholars to design studies focused on reproductive justice health services under the subcategories: abortion, birth, contraceptives, sexual health, and parenting.
This summer my focus has been on creating a social media initiative and helping plan the American Public Health Conference in October. I started my internship fairly recently so I have been focused on researching how other APHA(American Public Health Association) organizations are able to best push their social media strategy and what works with the general public. At the moment, I am focused on creating a social media toolkit that I will present on June 11th in a meeting. I have been using the push, pull, and extra strategy which focuses on identifying organizations that ACTIONS social media handles can reinforce and what we as an organization should create. The plan is after the toolkit is created I will create a team that will be implementing the toolkit I create and I will be making sure that the team follows certain guidelines. Eventually, I want to be able to create a bi-weekly newsletter focused on the current reproductive rights news.
I am really excited to continue my internship with the ACTIONS team and for the next couple weeks ahead. It has definitely been challenging being remote and having to coordinate meetings online but my experience so far has been fantastic. I plan on pursuing a career in Social Media and Marketing so being able to learn the skills I need in reproductive rights means the world to me.