CPNP USC 2018-2019 Board
The mission of CPNP-USC student chapter is to expose students to the field of psychiatric and neurologic pharmacy, raise awareness of mental health issues, and prepare our students to serve those suffering from neurologic disorders. To accomplish our mission, we provide our members the opportunity to participate in a number of programs and activities throughout the year. We have found that in order to have a successful student chapter with limited funds, three things are essential: low-cost activities, collaborations with outside organizations, and fundraisers.
Low-cost activities and collaborations go hand-in-hand for our chapter. For example, we collaborate with our faculty advisors who also serve as the chief editors for our chapter newsletter. Costs are kept extremely low since we only distribute the newsletter as a PDF. We also collaborate with our alumni to provide a CPNP-USC shadow program who love introducing students to neuropsychiatric pharmacy at their respective work sites. The Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles (HHCLA) is also a big collaborator of ours, and the naloxone distribution program and healthy minds projects are possible because of our strong partnership.
Finally, we often find groups of speakers who will donate their time to speak to our chapter such as people from Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services who talk about suicide prevention and individuals from NAMI who provide a free seminar called, “In Our Own Voice.” Although we can avoid most major costs through collaboration, we are not entirely void of costs which is where fundraising comes in as a means to increase our budget and facilitate teamwork and partnership amongst our board members.
Staying in line with CPNP-USC’s mission geared towards mental health, our organization has come up with a variety of unique fundraising activities, including sales of marketable products that showcase the pharmacy profession, selling popular food-items and drinks, and attending a paid TV taping in Hollywood’s CBS Studios.
First, we selected items to sell: syringe pens/ highlighters, pill pens, and pins. We also created customizable badge reels. Some of the badge reel designs we made included: Perry the Platypus, Baymax, Totoro, Pikachu, Kirby, and cute animals. Along with the merchandise, we designated two days for selling popular food on campus.
In addition to selling items, we were offered a unique experience to earn money for our chapter by watching a TV Taping at CBS Studios. At this event, a group of us were paid to watch a soon-to-be-released episode of the show Happy Together. It was a great experience!
Although we met our goals, we hope to explore even more ideas next semester. One idea is to sell study-break grams during finals week, composed of a coloring book, crayons, bubbles, tea, and candy. We also plan to start a new social event this semester known as Bingo “PSYCH” Night, where students who support the organization can come to play bingo. Instead of yelling “Bingo” with five in a row, players will yell “PSYCH”. We have already designed Bingo cards decorated with various antipsychotic and CNS medications to help increase student awareness of these medications and to promote our mission during the event.
We are excited to see the CPNP-USC student chapter grow as our fundraising efforts become even more effective.