Turning worthy causes into real jobs
NEW YORK — Global health is a popular cause on U.S. college campuses but after graduation jobs in the field can be hard to come by.
Some enterprising college students came up with a solution to that problem by working to start the Global Health Corps, which is providing recent graduates with health jobs around the world. It is being launched this summer as a pilot program by Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
The idea is to pair up 20 recent college graduates — 10 from the U.S. and 10 from various African nations — to work for a year with established non-profit programs in five target countries: Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi, Tanzania and the U.S. The new organization has raised $650,000 in grants with the Google Foundation as the biggest donor.
“A big part of our mission is to inspire people to stay in global health for the long run,” said Dave Ryan, executive director of Global Health Corps and a 2007 graduate of Stanford. “We’re trying to broaden the face of people who go into global health. We’re trying to create career paths.”
The idea was the brainchild of three college students who attended a conference last year with former UNAIDS director Peter Piot on the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif. The group has since received more than 1,000 applications for its 20 fellowships. One particularly appealing feature: Some of the teams will be working in poor sections of Newark, N.J., and Boston, Mass.
“We’re putting the ‘global’ into ‘global health,’” Ryan said. “We thought it would be an important and powerful thing to start with some partners in the U.S. as well if we want to be truly global.”
But don’t get the idea that these newly minted graduates will be doing one-off, stand alone projects, which have become something of a scourge in global health and development circles. They will be working in ongoing projects with organizations, like Partners in Health, that have a reputation for seeing beyond the five-year grant cycle of many programs.
Nor are the ranks of the GHC fellows necessarily going to be filled with aspiring nurses or doctors. Many are likely to have backgrounds in computer programming, management or engineering in order to help develop such things as electronic health records, leadership development programs and more energy-efficient buildings.
The Global Health Corps will pay the costs of travel, insurance and a living allowance for the fellows, taking away some of the risk for the partner organizations of working with young people who do not have advanced degrees. College graduates from the U.S. and Africa will receive the same stipends and travel expenses.
Many new organizations spend a lot of time trying to establish legitimacy in the eyes of donors and others. The Global Health Corps hopes it has a leg up in that respect, given the connection with Stanford and the fact that the GHC’s president is Barbara Bush, one of the twin daughters of former President George W. Bush. Her sister Jenna was one of the three college students who originally hatched the idea.
The fellows will begin their year-long assignment with a two-week orientation class this summer on the Stanford campus. There they will learn to identify some of the “cultural landmines” of international work, said Dr. Michele Barry, who just became Stanford’s first dean of global health and has lived in Ecuador, New Zealand, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Like any program that provides service opportunities for students traveling to other countries, the student-led Global Health Corps has to face a larger existential issue: Is it fair to spend $650,000 to give 20 recent college graduates a working introduction to global health? Could that money have been better spent on existing programs that employ many more people locally?
The folks at GHC look at what they are doing as more of an investment, the chance to inspire a generation — in both the U.S. and elsewhere — to recognize the importance of global health issues and to be able to do something about them. If they are successful in that mission, the investment will have been worth it.
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