Med students encourage volunteerism
Scholarship to offset the cost of foreign volunteer projects
MORGAN MODJESKI
Not even the busy schedules of fourth-year University of Manitoba medical students Kunaal Jindal and Jay Hagwala can yield their focus away from initiating a new scholarship called Helping Hands, which will fund student-instigated projects fighting poverty and its related problems on both a local and international scale.
While building houses in south central Mexico with Habitat for Humanity Jindal realized that the act of volunteering was one that came with an enormous and limiting price tag. “After spending two thousand dollars for the cost of volunteering, on top of my flights and expenses, I realized that the cost of volunteerism is quite limiting for many people.”
Jindal also realized that there is a lack of funding for these humanitarian projects and other projects like them. “I was trying to hit up certain venues like the Lions Club, the Rotary Club and MLA, trying to look for funding and I realized there wasn’t really a venue where students could apply for funding for these kinds of projects,” said Jindal. “Basically after spending all that money, I realized there is a need for a venue where students who are interested in these projects can apply for money.”
Helping Hands is a scholarship that will be open to all students in an undergraduate university program and there will be no specific qualifications needed to apply. It will be open to any student who has a project in mind but does not have the financial means to carry it out. “We are not putting any specifications or limitations on it. We want it to be open to all university students who want to do something great.”
Although Jindal and Hagwala have raised over $7,000 they are still in the process of working out how to make the scholarship available to students. “We don’t have the scholarship up for grabs yet. What we are planning on doing is meeting with some individuals from the University of Manitoba and maybe even from the University of Winnipeg to figure out what the best way to open this up to the students is,” explained Jindal.
As Helping Hands continues to grow, their goals for the future include providing as many scholarships as possible per year, and to expand outside of universities into high schools providing graduating grade 12 students with the scholarship. “The more we expand, the more scholarships we can give out per year, and it’s the more the merrier as far as scholarships go.”
Even though the scholarship venture will require a lot of time and effort, Jindal and Hagwala are ready to take on the challenge. According to Jindal, “When it’s something that you’re interested in and something that you want to see succeed, you will find the time.”
