Emory's Woodruff Health Sciences Center has many strengths to draw on in helping others: its large and diverse health care system, its vast repertoire of expertise and experience, and most important, its energetic, compassionate faculty and staff. They give free health screenings and talks (more than 150 each year to some 3,000 people), volunteer at summer camps for kids with cancer or other diseases, and organize projects to help those in need. Each year, for example, Cindy Cross, scientific program coordinator at Yerkes National Primate Research Center, leads an effort to fill Christmas stockings for kids in three villages in central Mexico. Yerkes employees fill bags with toys and also contribute school supplies and items for babies and senior citizens, and women from Cross's church drive the stockings to the villages. Last summer, Cross herself had the chance to travel there to meet the children for whom Yerkes has come to be a magical name.

Better than bingo
At several retirement homes in the Atlanta area, "monkey biz" is second only to bingo in popularity. It's part of an ongoing project sponsored by Yerkes National Primate Research Center that benefits both the animals living at the Yerkes Field Station and the retirement center residents who make food cups so the animals can enjoy naturalistic foraging behaviors. Yerkes staff provide guidance on what the animals like, and residents have the opportunity to tour the field station and see the fruits of their labor being enjoyed by the animals. Several retirement centers even compete in Monkey Biz Geri-Olympics for the center that can assemble the most cups.

Cheering on the home team
A young boy whose heart stopped after he was hit in the chest by a ball might have lived had bystanders had access to an automated external defibrillator (AED) to get his heart going again. Last year, the Woodruff Health Sciences Center (WHSC) donated such a device to Druid Hills Youth Sports Club, for use in the Medlock Park ball field near Emory's campus. Designed to reset the rhythm of the heart, AED devices are increasingly available at professional sports venues, airports, and other places. The gift of the AED and training in how to use it were just one sign of Emory's desire to support its surrounding neighborhood, says Ronnie Jowers, Vice President for Health Affairs and CFO of the WHSC.