“Health care professionals should know and understand the community they serve and it is our responsibility to teach this to our medical students. Through the Community Action Research Track (CART) medical students engage in service-learning and provide community service in response to the community needs. CART students are able to learn about the connection between their service and their roles as health care professionals."

– Nora Gimpel,M.D., CART Program Director

CART Community Service Opportunities

The Community Service Core (CSC) experience offers the opportunity to learn about community-based medicine, health related programs and the role of the community in contributing to the health of individuals. Students will participate yearly in community-based service projects designed to contribute useful health-related service to the community. The CSC is designed to reinforce the lessons learned throughout the CART core, while allowing students to be exposed to settings to which they might not otherwise have access to as part of their formal medical education.

Activities of the CSC may include but are not limited to: 

• Volunteering to work in a free clinic
• Participate in a local health fair
• Conduct classes on wellness
• Children's story time with topics on community health concerns
• Participate in health promotion and prevention activities (presentations, focus group, immunization program, walking program, etc)
• Participate in health screenings campaigns
• Workshops
• Video production to document health events and/or interactions within the community

Activities of the CSC include existing community projects to which students contribute their time or the development of new projects in collaboration with community partners. Click here to see past community projects developed by students.

All students applying to CART will be required to complete 20 hours per year as part of the CSC.

Community Service Projects:

The Monday Clinic is a student-run free clinic that began as a project headed by a group of first-year medical students from UT Southwestern. At the beginning of the spring semester in 2006, they united with the ideas of creating a clinic where medical students could help care for the community and improve their ability to provide medical care during the preclinical and clinical years. To learn more about the Monday clinic and how to volunteer click here.