Our Communities

Healthy Families

In addition to providing care in hospital and clinic settings, USC faculty members, staff and students help build healthy families through a wide variety of community-based programs ranging from outreach to children with chronic illnesses, to substance abuse prevention and treatment, to services for persons caring for cognitively impaired adults

Prevention and Education

Preventive services and health education are major means by which USC promotes healthy families. The annual USC Community Health Fair, for example, brings together various health sciences departments to provide flu shots, free preventive health screenings and health-related information to residents of the community adjacent to the Health Sciences Campus.

Other annual events include the USC School of Dentistry’s yearly Give Kids a Smile program, which offers screenings, oral health treatments and educational services to neighborhood elementary schoolchildren, and the USC School of Pharmacy’s Kids’ Day, which provides workshops on nutrition, sexual awareness, substance abuse and anti-gang awareness for students in local middle schools.

The university distributes health education through a variety of additional channels, such as the USC Health Now Web site, the Fuente Initiative and the USC School of Pharmacy’s bilingual fotonovellas, including Tentaciones Dulces/Sweet Temptations, which has been shown to increase diabetes awareness and knowledge among the Latino community.

Fitness

Fitness is another focus in USC’s healthy families initiative. Fit Families, for example, a program of the USC Department of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy, provides free evaluation, group exercise activities, individualized exercise programs and nutritional counseling services aimed at enhancing the potential for long-term lifestyle change for community residents who are at high risk for diabetes and conditions associated with physical inactivity.

The USC Office of Recreational Sports and Department of Intercollegiate Athletics are supporters of Kids in Sports, a program founded in 1994 to provide after-school sports programs in areas where most children have no access to organized sports or other healthful, adult-supervised activities when not in school.

Additionally, as part of the overall USC Family of Schools community-outreach effort, USC undergraduates, graduate students and student athletes offer after-school instruction in basketball, martial arts, soccer, volleyball and swimming to students in the third through fifth grade through the After School Sports Connection.