KIP Student Feature – Shreeya Khullar
Over the summer of 2024, Shreeya Khullar (CAS’26, Psychology) traveled back home to Little Rock, Arkansas to complete an internship at the Harmony Health Clinic. During their work there, Shreeya got to see another side of their community and help provide support to them and the clinic.
Q&A with Saanvi Thakur
Could you give us a brief description of the organization you are interning with and what your primary responsibilities are during this internship?
Harmony Health Clinic is a free medical and dental clinic that aims to bring healthcare to low-income, uninsured populations. During my time with them this summer, I organized demographic data for 500+ patients, including poverty line calculations, for use by the board of directors for patient mapping and funding analysis. I was tasked with community asset mapping of the greater Little Rock area and was the clinic coordinator and scribe for the doctors and medical students during clinic days.
What area(s) of justice does this organization work in and how did your internship help promote/fulfill these justice goals?
In my opinion, Harmony Health Clinic’s very existence in our community is an act of justice. Harmony Health Clinic is located in East Little Rock, an area on the outskirts of the city where marginalized populations have been pushed towards as a result of redlining and systemic racism. As a result, the area is severely poverty-stricken and consequently widely ignored—among government officials and suburbanites alike. However, the staff at Harmony Health Clinic and the volunteers here serve as a great example of what it means to work for a community. Harmony’s role in the community is vast, and not only serves its obvious goal of justice in healthcare but also in the many other struggles that are related. Harmony works against racial injustice, queer injustice, housing injustice, food injustice, and migration injustice simultaneously. In my work as an intern—particularly in community asset mapping—I had the opportunity to bridge gaps created by the failures of our institutions and, more significantly, be part of a collective effort to bring equitable access to healthcare and other necessities to Arkansas.
Has your work this summer changed how you think about justice issues?
I think my internship has been especially insightful in the way I understand justice issues locally. I was born and raised in Little Rock, but grew up in the suburbs and was fairly distanced from a lot of the deep-rooted issues in the city. Spending my summer at Harmony was invaluable to my understanding of the past and current obstacles faced by communities in Little Rock who are affected daily by the injustices of the state.
One of the more specific issues that I saw a lot of during the summer was what it means for non-English speakers to try and find healthcare services in the state. A majority of Harmony’s patient base is Spanish-speaking, and while we have the help of amazing staff and volunteer interpreters at clinics, sometimes things get lost in translation—especially with medical terminology. As a scribe, I worked closely with the rest of the team to accurately record a patient’s complaints and conditions, but there were times that we would get stumped on how to translate a specific condition or word to the patient. Think of all the ways and words you can use to describe pain in English, for example! This experience really encouraged me to think about diversity in healthcare and made me hopeful for a future with more Latino and Spanish-speaking healthcare providers to address this gap in Arkansas, as well as the rest of the country!
How did you find out about this internship, and what advice would you give to students hoping to apply for this funding opportunity in the future?
I found out about Harmony Health Clinic because I had many friends who volunteered with them in the past and found out about the internship from their website. My advice for getting this internship, or any other one, would be to take initiative! I had to email and call a few times to get the internship secured, but I am so glad I did.
How has the Kilachand coursework and/or the KIP summer mentoring sessions helped prepare you for the work you are doing during your internship?
The KIP summer mentoring sessions were really helpful in making me reflect on and articulate my experiences at Harmony into words. It can be so easy to get caught up in what you are doing day-to-day that you don’t necessarily think about how to translate your work into a meaningful discussion or powerful point on your resume, so the KIP summer mentoring sessions were really helpful for that. It was also helpful to talk to other people in the program about how they were going about their experiences!
Learn more about the Kilachand Internship Program here.