Category Archives: SVHAP

SVHAP: Call for Student Interns.

Hello Students!
As you are considering your schedules for next semester and looking for internship and fieldwork we wanted to inform you about a project that the Kinesiology department is involved in? The department received a grant to create The Silicon Valley Healthy Aging Partnership (SVHAP) which is committed to creating and supporting partnerships between community organizations to ensure that evidence-based health promotion programs are widely available on an on-going basis throughout Santa Clara County for all older adults. We are in our third year, and hoping to extend opportunities to more of our students.  We are also ow part of the county wide Falls Prevention of Santa Clara County (FPSCC).
What does this mean for you? We are working with various senior serving agencies to offer fall-prevention and exercise programs throughout the Santa Clara County area. Several of these organizations, including the City of San Jose, Portuguese Organization for Social Services and Opportunities, Yu-Ai Kai, and many others are looking for students to help teach classes to their clients, attend health fairs and give falls prevention presentations.
This internship would require that students be certified as instructors in either Matter of Balance, EnhanceFitness and possibly the Arthritis Foundation Walk with Ease. These training would be paid for by SVHAP. Some of these internships may be paid positions. If you are interested please contact Jennifer Schachner (jennifer.schachner@sjsu.edu).
We would like to start interviews in the beginning of the year so that interns are ready to start working as the semester begins!
You may also want to look at our website www.svhap.org for further information.
Hope you are surviving the end of the semester!

Falls Prevention Task Force Kick Off SVHAP

by Jennifer Schachner

The San José State Department of Kinesiology and El Camino Hospital are pleased to announce the launch of the Santa Clara County Falls Prevention Work Group (SCCFP). This group with will under the umbrella of the Silicon Valley Healthy Aging Partnership (SVHAP) . In tandem with the work that SVHAP is already doing to offer effective, low cost health promotion programs across Santa Clara County to older adults, the Santa Clara County Falls Prevention Work Group will bring together health care, public health, aging services providers, academia, funders, and many others to work together to reduce the risks of falls among older adults through advocacy, resource development and community and provider education.

For this Falls Prevention work group to be successful it needs broad participation from community partners interested in working together to help reduce the risk of falls in Santa Clara County.

We invite you to come to a stakeholder informational session to learn more about the SCCFP.

May 3rd 2013

9 a.m. to 11 a.m

El Camino Hospital

Silicon Valley Healthy Aging Partnership (SVHAP) Receives Health Trust Grant

The Silicon Valley Healthy Aging Partnership (SVHAP), directed by Tamar Z. Semerjian, Ph.D. and Jennifer Schachner, M.S. has had a busy start to the year. SVHAP is pleased to announce that we have received $90,000 from The Health Trust to continue our work for another 18 months. The Health Trust has also included SVHAP in a grant for $25,000 from the Council on Aging to fund translation of the Matter of Balance program into Vietnamese and to update and increase the functionality of our website (www.svhap.org). SVHAP was also awarded a grant from El Camino Hospitals for $70,000 to fund work for a Falls Prevention Task Force.

This will primarily involve workshops and outreach to senior serving organizations, their clients, and emergency medical service providers on how to prevent falls in the community. Dr. Semerjian and Ms. Schachner presented the work they have done over the past two years for SVHAP at the Center for Healthy Aging in Multicultural Populations (CHAMP) conference on April 5th. The Third Annual SVHAP meeting will be at the Sunnyvale Senior Center from 9 am-12 pm on April 19th, 2013. The meeting will include the announcement of the launch of new SVHAP supported programs, Tai Chi: Moving for Better Balance and the Arthritis Foundations’ Walk with Ease. Programs already supported by SHVAP are: Enhance Fitness, Matter of Balance, and Better Choices Better Health. SVHAP looks forward to another productive year of making evidence-based health promotion programs widely available to all older adults in Santa Clara County.