Good Deeds

Our scholarship program goes back to 1969; the first recipients were for paramedic education. We started awarding scholarships to medical and dental students in 1978. In 2007 we added two master of public health scholarships and a nursing scholarship. We now offer financial support for Ph.D. students in biomedical science attending advanced short courses at prestigious institutions such as the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. We continue to offer merit awards for medical and dental students and have added educational travel money for graduate students.

We opened what today is known as the Creative Care Center in 1977, making the UConn Health Center one of the first state agencies to offer on-site child care to its employees. It started with a director, one teacher, two aides, a college student, a junior volunteer, and room for 25 children. We managed the child care center for nine years before securing a grant and building on campus and turning it over to the Health Center’s Department of Auxiliary Services, which provided the resources to continue the program.

In 1979 the Art Advisory Committee was formed, acquiring 464 pieces of art for display throughout the Health Center. We now have more than 1,500 pieces of art here in our collection, most of them donated, and the paintings, sculptures, quilts, photographs and murals are on display and enjoyed by all the Health Center community and patients.

Over all these years we have overseen Auxiliary services such as patient television rental service, English as a second language classes, baby photo service, the Fuzzy Bear and Memory Box projects, a grant for diagnostic breast cancer workups for uninsured patients with mammographically detected suspicious breast lesions, and support for the mini medical school program.

Other initiatives include equipping the first rescue truck, funding research laboratories and equipment, furnishing hospital rooms, and awarding money to fill various requests from almost every department and school at the UConn Health Center.

Fundraising projects such as the Holiday Bazaar, Spring Market, raffles, vendor sales, gala events at the Bushnell, annual golf tournaments, fashion shows, lobster bakes, dances, Jazz Jam, and bus trips have given the UConn Health Center various social functions to attend and help to promote sharing and caring among our communities.

In 1994 when we celebrated our 25th anniversary, a group of quilters made the wonderful quilt that is displayed in the entrance lobby of the hospital. The quilt shows the many aspects of the UConn Health Center family. The Auxiliary also pledged that year to raise $250,000 for an endowment to provide loans for students here at the Health Center.

We donated $50,000 to the Health Center to outfit a new laboratory in the Academic Research Building, and dedicated the new lab in 2001.

Our biggest project was to endow a chair in bio-ethics to honor Dr. Jay Healey; a much-loved teacher whose untimely death affected everyone who knew him. We raised $900,000 and it was matched to make the $1.5 million chair! We are probably the only Auxiliary nationwide to have accomplished this. This chair was filled in 2006.

In 2008 we introduced two new programs: WHALE and The Family Place.

WHALE, an acronym for “We Have A Little Emergency,” is a child safety seat identification system that provides emergency personnel at an accident scene with vital information about the child in circumstances when the driver is unresponsive.

The Family Place is an extended-stay suite a half-mile from the Health Center at the Homewood Suites. Parents of premature or sick newborns can stay for free in The Family Place while their infant receives care in the NICU. Need is determined by social workers, nurses and physicians.