Grace Miu: With 91.9 KVCR News, I’m Grace Miu. As a current Riverside resident I stumbled upon the Riverside Free Clinic located at the First Congregational church in downtown Riverside. The Riverside Free clinic is an non-profit clinic that offers many free healthcare services including, but not limited to, medical, pharmacy, and dental. We have two amazing volunteers from the Riverside Free Clinic here today to talk about their experiences at the clinic and what a day in the life schedule would look like. So let’s hear what they have to say!
Kianna Le: Hi, my name is Kianna. So I have actually been involved with RFC for 2 quarters now, and I got involved with RFC because I wanted to find ways to serve my community, my local community. So I am actually involved in the nutrition committee. We are a committee that is dedicated to providing nutrition counseling in addition to healthy meal options for our patients. We often teach patients how to include a variety of nutritious diets into their daily life. For example, recently we were educating patients on how to incorporate a high protein diet into their daily meals. Every clinic we also make healthy snacks and meals, just to give them ideas on what they can make. Typically when I arrive at the clinic, each clinic lasts six hours. So every clinic we do a rotation between committee members to create a healthy snack. Recently, most recently last week, I made vegan chocolate chip cookies that were low carb. We used almond flour, also high in protein with almond butter. And stevia as a sugar substitute for many of our patients who are diabetic. We often alternate and we like to provide recipes for the patients if they are interested in the recipe and they would like it after trying a sample, they can also try to recreate it at home. And afterwards we also provide food boxes. Probably my favorite memory was two clinics ago when we had a cooking demonstration to showcase patients you know how to make healthy, easy meals at a low cost too. Because for a lot of our patients, the financial aspect of getting their meals is a huge one that often determines how they can get access to food in general. So we showcase to patients how to use the canned goods and dried goods that were provided in the food boxes that we were giving out, to make healthy nutritious meals. Just being able to see the camaraderie of all the volunteers — med students, nursing students, and pharmacy students — working together to serve the Riverside community as a whole, I feel grateful to be a part of RFC and I really enjoy every clinic…