globe logoCovering Global Health: A Primer for Journalists
Friday-Saturday, May 2-3, 2008
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Sponsored By:
University of Washington
  Department of Communication
  Department of Global Health
  Center for Global Studies
Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma
Washington Global Health Alliance
in partnership with:
The Seattle Times
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
KING5 Television
msnbc.com
Society of Professional Journalists
Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard
Northwest Science Writers Association
Northwest Chapter, National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences
Association of Health Care Journalists
East-West Center
International Center for Journalists
International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins
Table Talk Reception

Friday, May 2
5-7 p.m.
Health Sciences Rotunda

A dynamic forum to connect journalists with Northwest NGOs in a series of intense, intimate eight-minute conversations.
Chair: Paula Bock, pbock@iletter.net

Presenters

Clear Path International (CPI) serves landmine-accident survivors, their families and their communities. It provides medical and socio-economic services to survivors in Vietnam, Cambodia, along the Thailand-Myanmar border and in Afghanistan.

  • Representative: Imbert Mathee, President
  • Contact: imbert@cpi.org, info@cpi.org; (206) 780-5964; www.cpi.org
  • Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and Afghanistan
  • Bainbridge Island, WA; Dorset, VT

Engineers Without Borders-UW is a nonprofit humanitarian organization established to partner with developing communities worldwide in order to improve their quality of life. This partnership involves the implementation of sustainable engineering projects, while involving and training internationally responsible engineers and engineering students. The UW chapter has focused efforts in Latin America, working on irrigation, cooking stoves and roofs with chimneys in Bolivia. EWB-UW recently started a project in Suriname and has worked with the Puget Sound Professional Chapter on a design project in Ecuador.

Global Partnerships (GP) is dedicated to expanding opportunity for people living in poverty. We do this by supporting successful microfinance institutions (MFIs) that provide loans and other financial and social services to those living in poverty. All of our microfinance partners share our commitment to serving more people, including those in hard-to-reach places; providing loans to successful entrepreneurs as well as those who need an initial loan to get started; and offering services beyond microfinance to improve the lives of those living in poverty. Today, Global Partnerships works with 19 microfinance institutions in six countries throughout Latin America. Through these microfinance partners we are serving more than 500,000 borrowers, with more than $28 million in capital dedicated to our mission.

Indigenous Wellness Research Institute: To support the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples to achieve full and complete health and wellness. To collaborate with Indigenous peoples in decolonizing research, training and knowledge sharing to achieve the vision.

  • Representatives: Dr. Tessa Evans-Campbell, Interim Director, IWRI and director of the Center for Indigenous Child Welfare & Community Wellness; Katie Schultz, MSW, administration director; Dr. Bonnie Duran, director for Indigenous Health Research
  • Contact: info@iwri.org; www.iwri.org; (206) 616- 8731
  • Partners with tribes in the Northwest and worldwide
  • Seattle, WA

International Training and Education Center on HIV (I-TECH), a collaboration between the University of Washington and University of California San Francisco, is a global AIDS training program working at the invitation of ministries of health and the U.S. government to increase human and institutional capacity for care and treatment in countries hardest hit by the HIV and AIDS epidemic. We train doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lab technicians, counselors and other health care professionals responding to HIV in more than 20 countries worldwide.

Mama Maria Clinic provides health care through a fully staffed medical facility —offering affordable, localized health care and medicine, plus first aid, nutritional and HIV/AIDS education to the residents of Muhuru Bay, Kenya and surrounding communities. Mama Maria Clinic also supports a school lunch program for orphans, a goat program for widows and orphans, scholarships for deaf students and a community health education program. Founded by Peter Kithene, a village orphan who dreamed of helping his people by becoming a doctor.

Slum Doctor Programme: To improve the lives of those impacted by AIDS in Africa, we work with African partner-organizations to provide hope, education, food and healthcare. We have five project sites in East Africa that operate at the grassroots level and accomplish our mission. Besides providing services for people living with AIDS and orphans in Africa, we have a local educational program for the public and private schools and other community members; we offer a small Northwest town an opportunity to contribute to a large global concern. Free AIDS clinic, emergency medical care for AIDS patients, orphanage, cervical cancer, Girls’ Academy, agriculture training for AIDS widows.

Tibetan Healing Fund is a not-for-profit humanitarian organization established to improve primary health care and basic education for rural Tibetan women and children in Qinghai Province, PRC (Amdo, Tibet). Our founder and current board president, Kunchok Gyaltsen, who is both a Tibetan Buddhist monk and medical doctor, and presently a doctoral student in Public Health at UCLA, along with several in-country partners, have initiated and carried out our projects.  These have included: elementary school sponsorships, publication of school texts/primers written about Tibetan culture in the Tibetan language, convening of women's health professionals from throughout Tibet, publishing of textbooks on women's health for low-literacy village women (pictorial) and for educated health workers, including OBGYN’s; surveys conducted to gather information about basic health indicators of Tibetan households, "community midwife" trainings and the construction of a Natural Birth and Health Training Facility, to be run by Tibetans for Tibetan women and children.

Thirst Aid is dedicated to helping the world's poor solve their water problems. In a world where a child dies every 15 seconds from diseases associated with dirty water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene, Thirst-Aid's goal is to make knowledge of household water treatment and proper hygiene as common as how to cook rice or fry an egg. We use culturally appropriate education, social marketing and peer-to-peer training to introduce applicable safe water technology. In rural central Myanmar, Thirst-Aid developed two ceramic filter factories, trained 50 employees and produced and distributed more than 7,000 filters — impacting a population of roughly 42,000 people. Thirst-Aid has also produced 750 filters for pilot programs for peri-urban populations, manufactured and distributed filters for 6,000 households in the Thai tsunami region and 4,000 families along the northern Thai/Burma boarder. Thirst-Aid has trained 15 community health-care workers to teach, peer-to-peer, about hygiene, germ theory, waterborne illness and proper use and maintenance of ceramic filters.

Uplift International views health through a human rights lens and human rights through a health lens. Uplift International improves health and health equity through rights-based advocacy. We build relationships with professional associations, universities, and with health, law, and business professionals. Our work is carried out through collaborative partnerships that build bridges among diverse groups to respect, protect, and fulfill the right to health for vulnerable populations. In addition to programs focused on building capacity to promote the right to health, Uplift International is implementing the following programs: nutrition and health education for some of the country’s most deprived children — students at some of the poorest madrasahs and pesantren (Islamic schools), Avian Flu prevention (USAID), improved care for women and children victims of violence (Ford Foundation) and numerous disaster relief and humanitarian efforts.