Oberlin Street Medicine Initiative Is New, Meticulous—and Crowded
by Griffin Larson-Erf, Staff Writer
Illustration by Pilot Roberts, Layout Editor
“There is a fire hazard in Room A154 of the Science Center,” says the person sitting next to me. The hazard consists of four extra chairs, perched against the left wall, cramping the open aisle next to a row of fully-seated tables. When the meeting starts, there are roughly 50 people packed into the room; before the extra chairs arrived, two attendees had to sit against the back wall, for lack of other options.
It is Sunday, September 20. This is an interest meeting for the Oberlin Street Medicine Initiative, a new student organization dedicated to helping those without proper medical access, or places of their own to live, to find care in Lorain County and around Cleveland. At the front of the room, the board members begin to speak.
The Initiative—OSMI, for short—began in an Organic Chemistry lab in Fall 2025, according to co-chair Jenny Wei. Both Wei and fellow co-chair Sasha Chen served as TAs for the lab, and both are trained EMTs. During those sessions, Wei recalls talking to Chen about the lack of a focal point for EMT-trained Obies.
“Other schools have … student-led EMT or EMS services, and [at] Oberlin, we have such an abundance of these licensed or … certified EMTs, but they’re not really doing anything on campus or even in the community,” Wei says. “They’re usually out working with LifeCare [an Elyria-based medical transport company] or [at] other places, and they’re not really centralized to one spot.”
With research, Wei came to see how much Lorain County lacked in terms of “street medicine” services—medical help provided in a non-clinical setting, frequently to unhoused people, as defined by aid organization DirectRelief. She and Chen, deciding to remedy the situation with the help of other EMTs, reached out to people they knew with relevant knowledge and interests—who then enlisted friends of their own.
The soon-to-be board members of OSMI spent the spring of 2026 getting in touch with any organizations they thought might be helpful to them. That time resulted in partnerships with multiple local organizations: CityStreetRN, which offers blood analysis, health education, and care referrals in Lorain County; Thrive for Change, a Cleveland-headquartered harm-reduction group; and Street Medicine at Ohio State, a student group at Ohio State University that practices street medicine in Columbus.
Volunteers with OSMI begin by signing up for an orientation session, where, according to text messages provided to The Grape by the group’s EMT Medical Team Leader Sage Paterson, they will learn from members of Thrive for Change and CityStreetRN about how to provide the kind of care those groups offer. From there, volunteers take part in two different trainings, over the course of which they learn about harm reduction, first aid, and caring for wounds. In between the two trainings, volunteers shadow members of either Thrive for Change or Street Medicine at Ohio State, then decide whether or not they want to continue with OSMI’s work. Once both trainings have been completed, volunteers are able to perform street runs with a team of other members.
According to a text from Paterson, those runs will initially accompany CityStreetRN, in order to build trust with Lorain County community members, before the organization embarks on runs of their own. As explained by Gabriela Cantero, the group’s Director of Global Health, Research, and Education, that building of trust is particularly necessary for the work OSMI does.
“A lot of people that are on the streets, they went through a lot of traumatic … experiences in life, [which make it] very hard to really build trust with other people, especially strangers,” Cantero says. “Like, imagine you’re there and a stranger [says], ‘Oh, can I put a needle on you and vaccinate you?’”
The particular work that volunteers do will vary by where they work and what needs they are confronted with, Paterson says. At a minimum, they will tend to basic wounds, with the option to do other work depending on what they are comfortable with and qualified for.
What’s more, Paterson says, those comfortabilities run a fairly broad range. Among board members, they mention five to six EMTs, as well as students in the Global Health, Pre-Medicine, and Psychology programs; among those who have expressed an interest in volunteering with the group, more EMTs are present, as well as individuals with previous experience in harm reduction work. At the interest meeting, as participants talk amongst themselves in breakout groups, one student mentions an interest in practicing dental healthcare; another wants to provide mental health support as part of their volunteering. According to Kelvin Urassa, one of the Initiative’s board members in charge of Community Partnerships and Outreach, this diversity of interests is an asset to the group.
“[In] some of the places that we’re … potentially going to be volunteering at, there are people who need dental care, there are people who have been in accidents and have not gone to hospitals,” Urassa says. “There are people who have different medical needs, and therefore, by these [volunteers] having different interests … they’ll be able to meet those different needs.”
For the group of roughly six that began the Initiative, a room of roughly 50 people—and an assumed orientation attendance of over 100, per Paterson—is immensely gratifying. According to Wei, the group hopes to be officially chartered in time for Oberlin’s “Fall Kickoff” event for student health organizations on September 27. In the future, they also hope to become a designated nonprofit.
“We spent a lot of time planning this,” Urassa says. “We spent the entire last semester just doing groundwork, not putting [anything] out [to] the public. So yesterday [showed] us that everything we did wasn’t necessarily in vain.”
