BY PATRICK AMMERMAN

In print | Published March 3, 2011

This month, the Global Health Forum (GHF) is hosting a conference for global health advocates from other colleges and universities to come together and discuss their difficulties and successes in campaigning for health related issues. Titled The Global Health Project: A Conference for Student Collaboration, the student-run conference will provide Swarthmore students and guests a chance to hear about other successful global health initiatives, as well as to build a network of peers from several other schools who also have an interest in improving global health.

“We want to really foster each group’s objectives and work,” Jessica Downing ‘12 said, who is an executive board member of GHF and has been helping to plan the conference.

Students attending the conference will be invited to attend workshops, lectures, and student presentations about global health and advocating policy change. Two keynote speakers, Jennifer Staple-Clark and Danielle Butin, who each have founded global health organizations of their own, will give presentations that will be open to Swarthmore’s campus as well as to those attending the conference.

The idea arose from “[a] collective idea of how, if we brought student groups focusing in health, global health specifically, together to form a network and devise ways to contact each other, we could amplify the impact of each of our individual groups,” Downing said.

Melissa Frick ’12, another executive board member for GHF, said that the group had been frustrated because of the difficulties of reaching out to collaborate with other health groups in the past. “[The conference] was spurred by the difficulties we were confronting … trying to reach out to other schools and groups and trying to form a network,” she said.

The conference was advertised by GHF largely through personal connections. Members tried to reach other members of health-related groups in other colleges and universities. Currently, around fifty students representing ten different schools are registered to attend, a number which could increase as the event draws nearer. “It’s big enough to be successful and small enough to be manageable,” Frick said. Most of the schools represented will be from the Philadelphia area, although there are students from Harvard and Princeton registered to come, and even a group of students from Canada who have expressed interest.

“It’s actually turning out so far a lot more of the people who are interested in attending our conference are individuals rather than groups,” Downing said. This was also observed by Marjani Nairne ’13, who is one of the GHF members in charge of promoting the event at other schools. “Hopefully [the attendees] can take whatever they get from our conference and bring it back to their schools so, if we do this in the future, we’ll be able to attract more people,” Nairne said. She added that, by aiming to attract larger organizations in the future, logistics like transportation and housing will be easier to manage.

GHF leaders are very excited at the caliber of keynote speakers they will be bringing to campus.

Staple-Clark is founder and chief executive of Unite for Sight, which strives to provide cost-effective eye care to impoverished persons throughout the world. She began Unite for Sight when she was a sophomore at Yale University, making her a fitting speaker for an undergraduate global health conference; it has provided eye care to over 1,100,000 people worldwide. She has also received the National Jefferson Award for Public Service, which is considered comparable to a Nobel Prize for public service, according to Downing. Frick called Ms. Staple-Clark a “celebrity” in the global health field, and pre-med advisor Gigi Simeone thinks she will be “an inspirational role model for students here.”

Danielle Butin is the Founder of the Afya foundation (Afya means “good health in Swahili). “The goal of the foundation was to collect medicine supplies and send them to needy areas around the world,” Nairne said, who has been in contact with Ms. Butin for some time through previous global health initiatives she has been a part of. She was very excited that Ms. Butin will be able to share her experiences as a global health advocate as well as her experience with Afya.

In April, four GHF members will also be traveling to the Clinton Global Initiative University in California for a national conference on global health issues that is targeted towards undergraduate and graduate students. Downing, who attended the conference last year, said that some of the ideas for The Global Health Project have come from experience of the members at the Clinton Global Initiative conference, including the use of workshops and speakers on global health advocacy to generate dialogue among attendees.

Global Health Forum hopes that Swarthmore will be able to host more conferences like this one in the future, in order to foster stronger connections among student groups advocating for global health. “We’re going to try to bring students together from a variety of campuses to talk about … what role [we can] play to influence global health as far as policies and even projects,” Frick said.

“Swarthmore is an excellent place to host this conference, because Swatties are strongly interested in global health issues and in service,” Simeone said.

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