Team Ruby Cup
Every year, the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business holds its Global Social Enterprise Competition aimed at inspiring young entrepreneurs to find business solutions for the problems of poor countries.
Last year’s winners were focused on finding a better toilet, an MIT business venture called Sanergy that has since taken off in a big way — mostly in the slums of Kenya.
This year, women’s issues dominated.
Dean Chahim is a student of Civil & Environmental Engineering and International Development & Social Change at the University of Washington. Chahim co-founded and facilitates the Critical Development Forum, which is having one of its informal forums later today on the issue of climate change.
This is a guest post and the views expressed here are Chahim’s, in case you needed to be told that.
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Dean Chahim
A UW student at an Occupy Seattle event asks for less hope, more action
There is the social and political movement of Occupy Wall Street. The Arab Spring. And then there is Seattle’s exploding ‘humanitarian’ community. These are all driven, in part or maybe largely, by the younger generation’s desire for change – for a better world.
At the University of Washington, it’s impossible to miss what’s happening. The youth movement for change operates under many banners and goes by many names: development, humanitarian, philanthropic, global health, global service, social entrepreneurship. Here on Humanosphere, this has been described as a key feature of my “Millennial” generation.
New student-run NGOs seem to start here every week. Information sessions pack in students by the dozen. Flyers litter campus for the latest two-week trip to empower African villagers, help with sustainable projects, and oh yes, see a few waterfalls. They seek to work miracles, changing communities forever “in just five days.”
In between volunteer trips, they might send shoes to the Dominican Republic or bras to Nigeria. Yes, bras. Gently used bras.
There is no denying that some of the work they do has real benefits in the short-term for the poor and marginalized globally. But I would argue that many of these well-intentioned efforts don’t have much impact – and that they distract from the most powerful means to fight poverty and inequity, disease and suffering.
Politics.
I’m concerned that the way we frame our discussion around these efforts is actually stunting my generation’s view of social change. We dream of helping “one village at a time” through service overseas when, arguably, we could help many millions more through political activism here at home. Continue reading
Hundreds of students at the University of Washington packed into a classroom Monday evening for a panel discussion entitled, “Can You Save the World?”
Tom Paulson
Finding a place to sit at the UW's "Can You Save the World?"
Sponsored by a new student-run organization called the Critical Development Forum, it was an acknowledged riff on an earlier event we (KPLU Humanosphere) sponsored at Seattle Town Hall called “Can Seattle Save the World?” — this time aimed specifically at the concerns and questions of young people.
I’ve noted before that there’s something special going on with the Millennials and this event only confirmed my suspicion: They actually do want to save the world.
And they know it won’t be easy or simply based on good intention. Continue reading
Joanne Silberner
Uganda works to improve mental health care
Health journalist Joanne Silberner, former health policy correspondent based at NPR’s flagship in DC and now (lucky for us) based here in Seattle at the University of Washington, has done an excellent report on the lack of mental illness care in Uganda for PRI’s The World.
I’ve done a few stories here about the mental health in the global health context, noting it is both a massive contributor to the burden of disease yet gets almost no attention when it comes to the global health agenda.
As Silberner reports, the first in a PRI series she’s doing on mental health in the developing world, improved acess to work training for the mentally ill is perhaps just as important as improving and expanding access to treatment: Continue reading
In Monday’s Seattle Times, Sandi Doughton reports that “something huge” is happening here.
Global health.
(Yes, it’s huge here — which is why we’re holding a forum on it tomorrow night at Seattle Town Hall. See that box over to the right there, with the Space Needle? Please come and join the discussion)
The Times article is focused on one of the manifestations of the local hugeness of global health: The UW’s newest academic creation, the Department of Global Health.
Since being launched a scant four years ago, the department has grown to more than 50 faculty and 350 students. More than 900 applicants compete annually for 35 graduate slots and less than two dozen health-statistics fellowships.
And while state budget woes have forced cuts in other departments, funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has allowed Global Health to rapidly expand its course offerings.
“There is something huge happening here,” Judy Wasserheit, the UW department’s vice-chair, told the Times.
Indeed. And as Sandi reports, the UW is not alone. More than 70 American and Canadian universities now offer some kind of global health program. Here’s a list of some of them. Michael Merson, director of Duke University’s Global Health Institute, claimed that all this represents the “birth of a new academic field.”
I’m not so sure about that last part. Continue reading
Global health is a big deal in Seattle.
As a matter of worldwide significance, it is of course a big deal everywhere — by definition. But what I mean is that global health is today the cause célèbre for Seattle and throughout the region. It’s especially popular among the Millennials.
“Global health is the movement of our generation,” said Kristen Eddings, a program associate at the Washington Global Health Alliance and one of the primary organizers of a big global health shindig in Seattle coming this June known as Party with a Purpose.
More on Eddings and that party later. First I’d like to introduce a few other members of the movement:
Sarah Dawson
Sarah Dawson at eye clinic, Burma
1) Sarah Dawson: Burmese refugees and Seattle undergrads.
Dawson is a 21-year-old student at the University of Washington, a senior majoring in public health and Spanish. She already speaks Thai. Dawson helped launch the UW’s global health minor and wants to do something in the medical field.
And, in her spare time, she works on the Thai-Burma border helping refugees with emergency assistance, defensive training and human rights’ violations documentation.
“I’m most interested in maternal and child health issues,” she said.
Wait a minute. Before we get into the global health stuff here, what about that last bit that sounded like special ops?
Dawson used to live in Thailand, where her mother and uncle have established a humanitarian organization called Free Burma Rangers that works with refugees inside Burma (aka Myanmar). The Burmese government is not too keen on the organization, to put it mildly.
“We have some tense situations at times,” said the understated Dawson. She described one episode last summer that involved some gunfire, a fast hike through the jungle and a lot of, yeah, tension. Continue reading
Tom Paulson
UW's Steve Gloyd emcees global health trivia night
Tom Paulson
Cynthia Koenig and her Wello
If you walked into the dimly lit, wood-paneled room and listened to the fast-paced talk by Cynthia Koenig, you might be forgiven for thinking she just sounded like another one of those young, profit-oriented entrepreneurs looking for money from venture capitalists or other kinds of investors.
Koenig is, actually, one of those money-seeking young business types, except that the primary goal of her proposal is to make life a lot easier and safer for millions of poor women around the world.
Hence the Wello, a kind of goofy looking water-carrying wheel-barrel (no, that’s not a typo) that she and her colleague, Colm Fay, at the University of Michigan’s business school want to sell to poor people.
Saving time and money, for $25
Water collection and storage, it turns out, takes up a lot of time and resources for people (usually women) in poor communities around the world. The Wello is aimed at saving both, as well as providing a handy storage unit.
“We’ve identified India as the first market we’re going to enter,” she said during a pitch Thursday at the University of Washington.”We think this is rapidly scalable … with a social return on investment of $178.65.”
Okay, I admit I didn’t always follow everything being said. I know vaguely what is meant by a social return on investment, but I didn’t have time to ask Koenig how the Wello, which she estimates will initially sell for about $25, is calculated to have a social benefit of nearly $180 to an individual.
I didn’t have time because Koenig was just one of an amazing array of social entrepreneurs at the UW’s Foster School of Business’ Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC). The event ran all week and ended Thursday.
Koenig’s Wello won the “global health” prize of $10,000 from the UW Global Health Department.
“Grand prize” for perhaps the most unpleasant presentation
