Health for Humanity Volunteer and Sustainable Leadership Facilitator Grant Peirce will be presenting a workshop at the Green Lake Baha’i Conference, August 27-29, 2010, in Green Lake, WI.  “Integrating Scientific and Spiritual Skills: Health for Humanity’s Experience in Global Health Development” will focus on the direct relationship between a community’s moral value system and a sustainable public health environment.  Learn more at the Green Lake Conference website.

Administrative Manager Laura Youngberg and Sustainable Leadership Facilitator Grant Peirce just returned from a two week visit to our project sites in Ulaanbaatar Mongolia. We met with doctors who have received ophthalmology training from Health for Humanity to assess their growth in capacity to serve the needs of the populations of their public hospitals. We were able to determine that they no longer need our assistance to develop cataract surgery capacity, as they now have enough internal skills to train new doctors themselves. Next we will focus on pediatric ophthalmology, as almost half of the 2.9 million people in Mongolia are under 19 years old! We look forward to helping the doctors learn the skills and techniques, both in medicine and management, they need to become leaders for children’s blindness prevention in Mongolia.

Health for Humanity is pleased to be presenting a Social Enterprise Pitch at the 2010 Unite for Sight Conference, held at Yale University, April 17-18, 2010.   This conference will be an opportunity to learn and network with other organizations working in blindness prevention around the world, and also to share our unique model of combining technical training with leadership development to achieve sustainable changes in a country’s capacity for vision services.

Learn more about the conference here.  Health for Humanity Interim Executive Director Corinne Pierog and Leadership Coordinator Grant Peirce will be making their presentation  between 3:30 – 4:40 on Saturday, April 17.

Health for Humanity will once again be represented at the Global Activism Expo among the Chicago-area organizations that work internationally to improve conditions around the world. Please come to the Expo and stop by our booth to say hi!

Date: Saturday, April 17, 2010

Time: Noon to 6pm

Place: UIC Forum, 725 W. Roosevelt Road, Chicago, IL 60608

More information click here

We are invited to participate in this annual event because Health for Humanity’s Founding Director, Dr. May Khadem, was interviewed on the WBEZ public radio show Worldview about the impact of the Mongolia Vision Project.  You can listen to that interview here.

From the WBEZ website: “Hosted by Worldview’s Jerome McDonnell, Chicago Public Radio Presents… is thrilled to again present this remarkable celebration – complete with food, music and over 100 Chicago-area Global Activists, all featured guests of Worldview’s Global Activism Series. On the air for seven years now, the Series continues to be inspirational, and bringing everyone together for this Expo has quickly become an annual event.”

Last week’s terrible earthquake in Haiti has caused not only a staggering loss of life but also the destruction of its fragile medical, social, and economic infrastructure.  Health for Humanity is extremely concerned about Haiti’s medical needs and is currently seeking contacts and information to discern the best way that our organization, our supporters and our volunteers can assist the people suffering from this disaster.

We are deeply grateful to the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and Partners in Health, to name a few, for their crucial services in providing first-response emergency relief medical care to save the lives of those who have been injured.  Because Health for Humanity focuses on long-term health development projects, we currently have neither the infrastructure nor resources to immediately send volunteers to Haiti on our own.

To expand our ability to serve the Haitians as soon as possible, we are actively seeking new institutional alliances and associated volunteer service opportunities.  For example, The Vision2020 Partnership, a part of the International Eye Foundation, is in the early stages of collaboration with its affiliate organizations to build and staff an eye hospital in Haiti.  Health for Humanity supports this collective effort. We will keep our volunteers notified when opportunities are available to support this initiative.

If you are in contact with any groups that are organizing recovery work in Haiti, or have other information which could be helpful to planning activities there, please contact the Health for Humanity offices by phone or email.  In addition, we would like to encourage our volunteers to independently serve in whatever capacity possible with disaster relief organizations currently established in Haiti.  Information about other ways to donate or contribute to the Haiti relief effort is available on the White House Haiti Earthquake Relief web page (http://www.whitehouse.gov/haitiearthquake_embed).

As time goes by, we pray that relief will become recovery.  During this challenging process, Health for Humanity is committed to support the rebuilding efforts of Haiti’s medical institutions and to offer timely service in the cause of restoring Haiti and its people to health.  In the Baha’i Writings, it is written that “… When such a crisis sweeps over the world no person should hope to remain intact. We belong to an organic unit and when one part of the organism suffers all the rest of the body will feel its consequence” (Shoghi Effendi, Lights of Guidance).   Health for Humanity is committed to the unity of humanity and the recognition that we all share in the suffering and support of our brothers and sisters in Haiti and around the world.  Please join us in prayer and preparation for action in the days and weeks ahead.

In grief and hope,

The Board and Staff of Health for Humanity