Nachum highlighted the TEACH (Together Educating All Children in Hospitals) organization on this morning’s JM in the AM with co-founder/Director Yosefa Silber and Executive Director Isaac Snyder. Back story: In 2013, two Yeshiva University undergraduate students, Yosefa Silber of Monsey, NY, and Yair Saperstein of Cedarhurst, NY, founded TEACH, a program aimed at using exciting educational programming to stimulate the minds and bodies of hospitalized children – bringing an element of fun to an otherwise monotonous day, and challenging and empowering them through engagement with practical science concepts.
Thanks to the connections of their mentor, Dr. Edward Burns, Dean of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the students were able to kick-start the program at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in Bronx, NY, providing monthly modules for eager patients and their accompanying family members. The project proved wildly successful, and in just over a year, TEACH expanded dramatically, with students from universities across the New York/New Jersey area volunteering to teach sick children in nine local hospitals.
Now, just over four years later, TEACH (Together Educating All Children in Hospitals) is an international not-for-profit organization that leverages a dynamic cohort of over 500 student volunteers in the Unites States and Israel to bring hands-on educational science activities to sick children in 14 hospitals and medical centers on two continents. In the past year alone, over 75 modules have brought smiles to more than 550 children.