Uma Khemraj (CAS/SAR’21) may be home for the semester in Billerica, MA, but that isn’t stopping her from using her BU education to help others. She is president of Healthcare Improvement, which is a campus group that strives to bring people together and take action to improve our national healthcare system, and right now the group is collecting hand sanitizer for local homeless shelters. She says she’s receiving “quite a number of bottles of sanitizer” to her house from people connected to BU, friends from other schools, and area distilleries such as Short Path Distillery and GrandTen Distilling. “It’s great to see the community come together in an effort that will see some tangible change,” she says.
Uma is now bottling all her collections to distribute to Boston Health Care for the Homeless, Haley House, and the Boston Rescue Mission, while also juggling remote learning and adjusting to being home. She marvels at how her professors have been able to find ways to connect students in their classes who are now all over the globe.
“This virus is really testing the resilience of communities and will hopefully be a catalyst for more community health improvement and reexamination of how healthcare is provided,” Uma says. If you would like to donate, please email Uma at ukhemraj@bu.edu.