Students Promoting Activism and Recruitment Campaign

As you might have noticed if you visited the IPPNW World Student Conferences in Beijing, Helsinki, or the most recent Congress in New Delhi, student membership in IPPNW is not distributed evenly throughout the world. There are large gaps, even in countries which formerly had very active student groups.

This development might not seem to influence the work of IPPNW right now, but it will have serious repercussions in the future, when finding interested physicians to continue IPPNW's mission will pose an even greater problem than today.

Within Europe, students who saw this problem within their region have been able to spread the sparks of activism recently to countries like Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Spain and Poland, effectively building new student chapters in these countries and promoting student activitiy where there wasn't any before. The term "spreading the sparks" inspired this campaign. SPARC - Students Promoting Activism and Recruitment Campaign.

A recruitment campaign, which would include both students and physicians from countries with low student participation, might be just the right way to ensure continuous student activity and lay the foundation for future generations of IPPNW physicians, while at the same time getting them acquainted directly with the experienced physician members.

But we need you for this! This website will show you some ways of how you can help. "Joining the campaign" might simply mean printing out our handouts and passing them on to interested students. It could also mean translating documents, travelling to other universities, meeting with physicians and students from other countries - how much you want to contribute depends entirely on you.

This campaign was originally designed to last for one whole year - from the summer of 2005 until the summer of 2006. Evaluation of the campaign was planned for the 2006 Helsinki Conference (updates on this evaluation to be posted later).

Read on to see how we plan to learn more about this campaign.