Category Archives: Social Movements

Haiti’s first Cardinal: A movement towards O for the P

Here is something interesting: Pope Fancis recently appointed the first ever Haitian Cardinal during the appointment of new Cardinals which occurred on January 12th, the fourth anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti. His name is Bishop Chibly Langlois of Les Cayes, Haiti.

“The appointment this January 12, 2014 will help focus attention on Haiti, especially on our Roman Catholic Church in Haiti, where the realities, the needs and the challenges will be brought up to a much higher level,” Cardinal-designate Langlois said in statements to Alter Presse.

Some analysts suggested that the Pope’s decision to announce the cardinal appointments on the four-year anniversary of the earthquake may have been a sign of special consideration for the devastated country.

The 2010 earthquake killed more than 200,000 people in Haiti and left more than 1 million homeless. It destroyed dozens of churches, including the archdiocesan seminary. Archbishop Serge Miot of Port-au-Prince also perished in the quake.

As president of the Haitian bishops, Cardinal-designate Langlois has worked in recovery efforts. He has also led the Church’s mediation efforts in talks between Haitian President Michel Martelly, the opposition and the parliament, in order to help carve out a path towards rebuilding the country.

First, I had no idea that Haiti had never had representation in the College of Cardinals. So, this is a big deal for Haiti, and the Catholic Church in that regard alone. But, it turns out that Haiti is not alone and Pope Francis is appointing Cardinals from poor countries around the world — from Asia, Latin America, the Carribean, and Africa — bucking the historical trend of Cardinals hailing almost exclusively from Europe and North America.

Why does this matter?

Well, it’s important to reflect on this as a matter of theology, and Pope Francis’ alignment with Liberation Theology, as demonstrated in his first Apostolic Exhortation which dismisses trickle down economics and the continual growth in economic inequality. Pope Francis recently met with one of the founding Fathers of Liberation Theology, Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez, a landmark for a theology that has at times been at odds with the Vatican. Making a preferential option for the poor certainly means bringing those who have been marginalized or excluded to the decision making table.

Second, this has the potential to have significant implications for those concerned about global health equity and our ability to bring millions of more people into the fight for health as a human right. From the same article in the New Catholic Reporter, Paul Farmer links these developments to the movement towards a focus on a preferential option for the poor:

Farmer, who is Catholic and says liberation theology inspired him, said he hopes that Francis’ meeting with Gutiérrez does mean an easing in the Vatican’s stance toward liberation theology, because that would allow the theology to spread more widely.

In particular, he said, he hopes that agencies, nonprofit groups, and governments that provide assistance to the world’s most impoverished people would adopt Gutiérrez’s ideas about a “preferential option for the poor” and his work on issues of structural violence.

Those groups “need this kind of inspiration,” Farmer told NCR.

“They need to understand that it’s wrong not to use these ideas,” he said. “That if you don’t understand structural violence, for example, you’re grasping around in the dark in public health, public education [and] poverty reduction. These ideas really warrant not just rehabilitation but widespread dissemination.”

All of this is amazing to think about: we now have the President of the World Bank, The Pope, and the President of the United States all expressing serious concern with inequality and the social problems it creates. This seems like a major moment of political opportunity. Will we be able to mobilize the grassroots pressure to capture this growing political opportunity and demand that real programs, policies, and systems be put in place to protect the poor and marginalized?

The movement for UHC

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The Center for Strategic and International Studies has a nice primer on the “movement” for universal health coverage. The report doesn’t go into very much depth, but it does provide a solid overview on where the players are, the major gains that have been made, the historical context of UHC, and the challenges that could prevent forward motion.

They describe the current moment as the early phases of a “movement”:

And so the movement is gaining steam. Across the globe, national, regional, and international initiatives are under way to address barriers and provide models and assistance for governments seeking to expand health coverage; universal health coverage is even being discussed as a possible goal for the United Nation’s post-2015 global development agenda (see appendix 1). As a result, millions more people globally now have better access to health services and countries are prioritizing health spending (see graph below).

Major points from the report:

As national incomes rise, citizens are demanding access to more and higher quality health services.
Increasingly, low and middle income countries are paving the way with new and innovative models of UHC: Rwanda and Mexico are case examples.
Advancing UHC is a complex process and is fundamentally political: the government must invest more resources in health care delivery.
One major tension exists between food, beverage, and alcohol companies and proponents of UHC. Margaret Chan of the WHO has likened them to the tobacco industry, who see potential regulation as a significant threat to their business.
Scaling up UHC will require more efficient and robust tax collection systems and public redistribution of wealth.

The report does not go so far as the Global Health 2035 commission and does not discuss the potential economic gains to be had through strategic investments in hight quality health delivery systems. But, once again, we see a big opportunity for large scale advocacy at local levels and international levels. As the Millennium Development Goals come to a close in 2015, what type of galvanizing advocacy movement can propel us towards investing in policies and systems that can further justice in health?

Purpose, Technology, Communtiy Organizing

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Check out this great and brief presentation by Jeremy Heimans who is the founder of Purpose, a group working to help organizations and movements harness the myriad of tools available today to combine and build power around issues that matter.

The thing that strikes me most about Purpose, and most conversations about ‘social movement building’ in the 21st century, is the focus on technology and new tools that allow people to associate and communicate. As Heimans discusses in his talk, it was only a couple of decades ago when the finest piece of organizing technology available was the fax machine. How does the accelerating pace of the development of tools, platforms, and modes of communication create new structural potential for people to work together on issues that matter?

There’s no doubt that technology, novel platforms, and modes of communication have the potential to revolutionize the way we aggregate power. But I also hope that the focus on technological innovation doesn’t distract us from the task of building human, person to person, real organizations that allow people to form new relationships that are rooted in common purpose and that allow those people to act collaboratively to take action with one another.

I don’t think that these things are by any means mutually exclusive. But, I do sense a tension between the silicon-valley-esque slickness of online mobile platforms and the very 20th century seeming models of old school community organizing. In the end, the space of innovation is probably someplace at their intersection. We need to simultaneously innovate on tech tools while also better cultivating organizations and institutions that foster the relational capacity between people to get real work done.

World Day of Social Justice

Reposted from the Partners In Health website: http://www.pih.org/blog/world-day-of-social-justice-what-it-means-to-pih-and-how-you-can-help

My reflections on PIH’s work to advance a social movement dedicated to health and social justice.

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February 20, 2013, marks the seventh annual World Day of Social Justice, a day dedicated to advancing a world that promotes a peaceful and prosperous coexistence.

Partners In Health has worked to pioneer and galvanize a social justice approach to global health since its inception 25 years ago, working alongside displaced peasants in the Central Plateau of Haiti. But what do we mean by a social justice approach to global health, why does it matter, and how is it different than other approaches?

For PIH Co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer, social justice means providing a preferential option for the poor in health care. For us, this means that the poor and their interests should always be the top priority in all our efforts. We take this approach because it is a moral imperative, but also because it makes good epidemiological sense. Those who live in the throes of extreme poverty bear the brunt of ill health and preventable disease.

Furthermore, these efforts should be carried out in “pragmatic solidarity” with those facing injustices. As Dr. Farmer explains in his book Pathologies of Power, “Solidarity is a precious thing: people enduring great hardship often remark that they are grateful for the prayers and good wishes of human beings. But when sentiment is accompanied by the goods and services that might diminish unjust hardship, surely it is enriched. To those in great need, solidarity without the pragmatic component can seem like so much abstract piety.”

Therefore, a social justice approach requires immediate, pragmatic action paired with a larger critical analysis of, and fight against, structural violence. In other words, in our fight to eradicate structural violence, we cannot overlook those suffering now. As Dr. Farmer puts it in Pathologies of Power, “The destitute sick ardently desire the eradication of poverty, but their tuberculosis can be readily cured by drugs such as isoniazid and rifampin.”

But what are we supposed to do if we are not a doctor, nurse, or public health professional? What actions can we take in our daily lives to advance the human right to health?

For me, a non-health professional, these are questions I’ve wrestled with long and hard. As someone based in the U.S. with little in the way of technical skills, what difference can I make in the lives of a Haitian man with tuberculosis or a woman in need of a cesarean section in Neno, Malawi?

To me, community organizing—identifying and recruiting volunteer leaders, building community around that leadership, and generating power from that community—is a mechanism through which each of us can contribute to help shift the structures that prevent much of the world from being able to live healthy, dignified lives.

A heartening trend is the ballooning interest in global health among college students, young professionals, religious congregations, and even companies and their employees. Many organizations have grown in response to this inspiring trend: GlobeMed, FACE AIDS, and the Global Health Corps to name three. Each is focused on building deep communities of solidarity and leadership around the common purpose of advancing and realizing the human right to health for far more people around the world.

Looking forward, we need to explore new ways of collaborating to learn, teach, and raise the profile of the social justice approach to global health. We need grassroots fundraising teams so that more people support PIH and other organizations with similar mandates. And most importantly, we need to build more aggressive advocacy campaigns and actions that improve the way foreign aid and development assistance impact the rights of the poor.

PIH’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Joia Mukherjee once said, “No data in the world, no good vaccine, no potent medicine will get to the poorest of the poor without you. There will be no equity without solidarity. There will be no justice without a social movement.”

On this World Day of Social Justice, let’s reflect on the fact that just as there will be no justice without a social movement, there will be no social movement without community organizing.

If you are interested in joining us in this movement to advance social justice and the human right to health, sign up to be a Community Organizer with PIH | Engage.

Thank you for all that you do—it means the world to us.