Reflection: Tisa Kent
Below is a reflection from former leadership team member Tisa Kent. She recently graduated from nursing school and we wish her best of luck!
Petition to Ban Tear Gas
The idea to have health science students and faculty petition to ban tear gas in Oregon was a project I brought to the OrSSC in June of 2020, when police were using tear gas against people protesting racial injustice in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a nursing student, I recognized that crowds of people being exposed to tear gas had the potential to massively spread COVID-19 through causing coughing and chaos that would inhibit social distancing. I partnered with Ryan Stoner, a medical student to draft and edit the petition. We then got feedback from other members of the leadership of the OrSSC, as well as a couple of other student organizations and made further edits. At one point we decided not to share the petition with non-student community organizations for feedback.
We disseminated the petition amongst the students at different programs within OHSU and PSU through a google document that could be edited by anyone with the link. Over 150 students added their names to the document. We then disseminated the document to Oregon senators representing the Portland metro and surrounding areas, the Governor, the Mayor of Portland, and the Police Chief. We heard back from some of the senators that a bill was being drafted that would ban the use of tear gas in most circumstances. On June 30th of 2020, a bill was signed into law that banned the use of tear gas by law enforcement in Oregon unless the situation met the legal criteria of a riot.
Many groups came together to call on our lawmakers in Oregon to ban the use of tear gas, and many still feel the ban does not go far enough. Overall, I feel this project was successful in that we were able to make our voices heard by our lawmakers. One of the reasons this project was a success was that we were able to create the document, get feedback, get signatures, and disseminate the document within the span of 2 weeks. This allowed us to reach our senators before they were voting on the bill to restrict the use of tear gas.
Throughout this project we had to balance getting feedback from various groups on the petition with the need to get the petition out in a timely way. While collaboration might always seem like a good idea, having more people involved in the creative phase of a project can make a project harder to finalize. In the future, when thinking about how many people or different groups to involve in a project, I would consider the timeline of how soon the project needs to be done for it to still be relevant.
Mask Education Campaign
The idea for the mask education campaign came from masks becoming recommended by the CDC in April of 2020, and observing that people at the time often wore masks ineffectively or not at all. The idea was to disseminate information about how and when to wear masks to the public to increase the number of people effectively wearing masks.
A group of three nursing students and one public health student formed from the OrSSC and began to work on this project in April of 2020. We met as a small group and assigned each of us to create a flier on a different subtopic related to wearing masks. We shared these fliers with one another on a google drive folder, gave feedback on the fliers, and made edits. We also recruited Spanish speakers to translate these fliers into Spanish.
We partnered with Masks for ¡Salud! to distribute fliers describing how to clean and maintain cloth face masks along with cloth masks to Yakima County farm workers in July of 2020.
We applied for and eventually received funding from the All Hill Student Counsel of OHSU to print out our fliers for public distribution, however this was not until August of 2020. We began posting our fliers in public spaces in September of 2020. By that time masks were mandatory in public indoor spaces in Oregon, and most all shops and buses had already created their own fliers advising people to wear masks. Because of this, we had trouble finding shops that were willing to have our fliers posted.
We had some success with this project with getting informational fliers to farm workers who were receiving masks. However, the project took too long to have a strong effect on public education on mask wearing. In the future with a situation that is as rapidly evolving as the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, I would design a project that could be completed in a quicker timeframe – perhaps a month at the most.
