A student-led effort at WMU Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine (WMed) aimed at providing improved diabetes screenings and education for Spanish immigrants in Southwest Michigan has been awarded a Medical Student Service Leadership Project Grant from the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society.
The funding, a total of $9,000 over the next two years, will support the project “Targeted Diabetes Education Intervention for the Spanish Immigrant Population,” which is being led by M1 Michael Smart with the help of Cheryl Dickson, MD, MPH, associate dean for Community Education and Engagement.
The grant will help boost efforts that began in late 2025 when a group of students along with Dr. Dickson began providing monthly health screenings at El Concilio, a Kalamazoo-based nonprofit that seeks to help Latinx residents support their families, contribute to society, and appreciate their cultural significance in the region.
Smart said he and three other students typically see 10-15 people at the monthly health screenings, which include blood pressure and blood sugar checks. With the grant money from the AOA, Smart said students plan to purchase additional glucometers and an A1C machine to provide more thorough screenings for diabetes. They will also produce educational materials in Spanish to help patients learn more about how to manage their diabetes.
“We will be able to scale our screenings a little more and hopefully impact how patients perceive their disease and engage with ways to properly care for their diabetes,” Smart said. “I think it has the potential to be really powerful in helping us identify patients and getting them treatment so they can avoid long-term complications.”
The project at WMed was among 12 from medical schools across the country that were awarded grants from the AOA. The AOA Medical Student Leadership Project Grant is awarded annually for service-learning projects that seek to help underserved populations.
Before he came to WMed in the summer of 2025, Smart, a native of Gillette, Wyoming, worked for 12 years as a nurse. Helping patients from underserved populations has always been important to him and he said the decision to leave nursing to pursue his MD degree in Kalamazoo stemmed from his belief that he could care for and help even more patients as a physician.
“I think it’s really important to help patients who are underserved,” Smart said. “And this is a way for us to really help the community and learn a set of skills that we can carry forward with us here at WMed and into residency and practice.”
After he arrived at WMed, Smart worked with Dr. Dickson and submitted the grant proposal for the targeted diabetes education intervention at El Concilio in February. In April, they learned that the project had received the funding from the AOA.
As part of the grant application, Dr. Dickson said a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) that two WMed alumni – Cristal Cabrera Colon and Amelia Hensler – helped lead at El Concilio in November 2025 proved incredibly valuable as it showed clients had a high interest in diabetes education and prevention. The grant from the AOA will now help with addressing that need, she said.
“We’ve established a presence at El Concilio and there’s a trust there now with us being there,” Dr. Dickson said. “The new A1C machine will help us provide even better care and the new educational materials will be helpful and easy to read. The work is important because there are populations that are vulnerable and marginalized, who have healthcare needs and are not getting enough services.”