I am a college student at the University of Cincinnati and have had Type I diabetes for over 12 years. After struggling with my transition to college I have decided to create a student organization that would help students with diabetes and students whose family members have diabetes.
I am still in the very beginning stages of creating this student organization and amy looking for any insight possible. What should be included in such a group? For those of you that may have experienced similar groups on other college campuses, what were your experiences like? Did you have weekly meetings? Guest spakers? What was the focus of the group?
All comments and ideas are much appreciated.
Thank you!!
Glad you are here! This is a GREAT idea! I tried something similar in college, but I was at a small school and there were only 5 people with type 1 diabetes… and only one of them was interested-- so we just met the two of us regularly. I know that one of our members started a similar somewhere in Texas. I will try to find her profile page and send it to you.
Thanks for the help. I’ll leave the blog up for as long as I can so that those interested can still respond. Kristin, if you can find the profile from the girl from Texas that would be excellent.
What I have so far is similar to the coed fraternity I am in right now. I did a lot of research on successful student groups and the key words I kept coming across was democracy, a board of leaders, organization, and preparation. With that being said I am going to be spedning several months to set this up properly so that hopefully it will continue on after I graduate college. I know that I need to have a president, treasurer, secretary, etc to lead the group. We’ll need money to fund events and we’ll probably make the Walk to Cure Diabetes a serious ongoing fundraiser. We’ll need someone to interface with the public. We need the leaders to structure and manage these things.
As far as what the group itself will do I thought about having meetings twice a month. One meeting is going to be educational. It will focus on a specific topic such as exercise, insulin pumps, A1c levels, counting carbs, alcohol consumption etc. Those lesson may be taught by guest speakers or people in the groups may be able to share their experiences with such topics and there would always be an open forum at the end of the meeting for people to ask questions and share stories. I believe the second meeting should be something fun. It should get the group out together to do something that relates to the topic of the month. This way you can practice what you have been taught or what you have learned. If exercising is the topic of the month then do something related to exercise. If it’s something to do with counting carbs, take a trip out to eat together and support each other in making positive decisions when ordering and how to correctly count carbs.
With that being said, what do you think? What are some topics that you feel need to be touched on about Diabetes in college? Do you think a plan like this would be successful?
I found the page of the member that I was thinking about. It’s Lindsey and here is her blog post about this topic.
I’m sure that she would love to hear from you!!!
