Investing in the academic success of students, particularly those from diverse and low-income backgrounds, is an investment in the future health of communities.
Through Kaiser Permanente’s work in schools and our support for college and career readiness, we are supporting economic opportunity in communities by giving people the skills, knowledge, and access to higher education that will sustain them throughout their lives.
Kaiser Permanente’s Community Health Careers initiative aims to improve career paths for underrepresented individuals and to help diversify the health care workforce. We work with local schools and nonprofits to provide programs that expose diverse and disadvantaged students to a broad array of health care professions.
We collaborate with both internal and external partners to create and/or support programs focused on helping individuals to aspire to attend college, persist to degree completion, and join the health care workforce. We are committed to positively impacting community health and promoting socioeconomic mobility by addressing education gaps and diversifying the health care workforce.
The Ignite Scholarship Program is a partnership between Kaiser Permanente, Portland State University, and Portland Leadership Foundation that provides scholarships and social, career, and academic support to service-minded, pre-health student leaders who want to make a difference on campus and in their communities to help them succeed as future health care leaders. After completion of an extensive leadership training program, Ignite Scholarship recipients serve as mentors to incoming pre-health students.
By providing social, career, and academic-oriented supports while reducing financial barriers and increasing the time students have available for activities to support their success, we aim to increase the success of students in their pursuit of health care careers.
Since 2008, The Kaiser Permanente Northwest Health Care Career Scholarship Program has provided millions of dollars in scholarship funding to help students achieve their dreams of becoming health care professionals.
Scholarships in amounts of $5,000 and $10,000 were awarded to select seniors who attend one of 140 approved high schools in the Kaiser Permanente Northwest service area, which spans from north of Longview, Washington, to Eugene, Oregon.
Students who receive the scholarship as high school seniors were eligible in their second year of college to apply for an additional scholarship to be applied toward their third year of college.
Recipients of the Kaiser Permanente Northwest Health Care Career Scholarship who are pre-medical students (planning to become physicians) are also eligible to apply for a small group of paid summer internships offered by Northwest Permanente, the physician group for Kaiser Permanente in the Northwest. These internships are available exclusively to pre-med Kaiser Scholars and include clinically relevant administrative work and one day per week of shadowing with a physician. For more information on the Kaiser Permanente Northwest Scholars Pre-Med Internships, please contact Jelena Vidovic, project coordinator, Northwest Permanente.