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 ABOUT US
DEAR CFHI COMMUNITY MEMBERS,
The theme of this year’s report is Then and Now as we take a look over our shoulder and contemplate for a moment how far Child Family Health International (CFHI) has come since 1992. Looking back over the 15 years CFHI has been in operation, we are pleased to say that we’ve achieved so much together while staying true to our course of promoting human welfare in a socially responsible and financially just way. From humble beginnings—only six years ago we were two staff working out of a back room—we have grown to become a $3.4 million organization. We’ve done this by connecting the strengths of our host communities with the enthusiasm of the socially compassionate. To express this in another way, we are building something to support the ingenuity and self-awareness of underserved communities to practice good healthcare while offering quality service-learning rotations for our students—tomorrow’s healthcare champions and advocates
When CFHI started, the internet was a nascent technology, cell phones were the size of bricks and the preserve of financial whiz-kids, and global health was a remote-ish blip on the academic radar…barely valued by medical schools. How times have changed! Now it is our far-flung 250+ global partners who use the internet to communicate with us on a daily basis, cell phones are tiny but ubiquitous (we even provide our students with one while overseas for their safety and convenience), and global health has moved center stage…no longer a poor relation traveling under the guise of a research opportunity, but rather a subject of scholarly concentration AND one that also brings in big tuition dollars.
Given this state of affairs, the question is—or at least, should be—what happens to these tuition dollars: to whom should they go and by what mechanism? These are important considerations if we are earnest about creating better outcomes for underserved communities and—at the same time—better, more-rounded health science professionals. By way of an answer, we feel that CFHI’s model is motivated by the belief that we are shaping the delivery of global health education in an ethical, inclusive and inspirational way. We are returning the tuition dollars to the host communities wherein our students receive expert instruction and guidance, and we are honoring the strengths of these communities—across India, Ecuador, Bolivia, South Africa, Mexico and Nicaragua—by empowering them to tackle their specific healthcare challenges in the most appropriate ways that they see fit.
This is a truly amazing time to be involved in global health. The global health landscape has changed a great deal in terms of access points and career opportunities. And in harmony with this sea-change, CFHI’s two-way model, which provides people from the developed and developing worlds the opportunities to rub shoulders and exchange knowledge and resources, is gaining wider and deeper traction.
In this report you will read accounts from CFHI’s global partners and alumni about what our global health programs have meant to them. Some accounts describe in a very personal fashion how much the creation and development of our sites has changed lives and brought people more richly into each other’s worlds. As the well-being of all of us becomes an increasingly inter-related issue, we at CFHI appreciate the real value of providing our students with the tools and opportunities to become ambassadors of compassion...agents for change. We passionately believe that global health education can be a real vehicle for teaching and demonstrating the benefits of harnessing positive collective thinking and reaching out ever more widely to avoid the straitjacket of parochialism or complacency.
Whatever the next 15 years brings, we would like to thank all CFHI supporters for your involvement, and to close our message by inviting you and your peers to become even more involved with CFHI. Simply stated: your engagement with our work changes lives in many places across the world, and on many levels. To this end, we are excited about the new resources we are working on, and of which you will see evidence very soon with the unveiling of our new web site in the early fall of 2007. In the meantime, we welcome you with open arms to continue sharing in this happy and healthy conversation.
Sincerely,
Evaleen Jones, M.D.
CFHI President/Founder & Medical Director |
Gunjan Sinha
Board Chairperson
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 DEAR CFHI FAMILY,
This year’s annual report looks at all that CFHI has become as we celebrate our 15th anniversary! From the simple but grand notion an idealistic medical student had all those years ago to a thriving organization that is making a real difference in medical education and community development, CFHI continues to advance a vision of quality healthcare for all by connecting both these points on the healthcare continuum. Please find herein descriptions of some of our accomplishments and stories of how CFHI has made a positive impact. I would like to take this space to think for a moment about the next 15 years by going back to the roots of CFHI.
I am writing this letter during a program trip to Ecuador, the first country that our founder, Dr. Evaleen Jones, visited over 15 years ago when she was that idealistic medical student. As I think about the future, I think about sustainability, about how to have a lasting effect, and I am so happy to see the evidence of it here.
I have just returned to Quito from visiting remote communities in the Amazon region of Ecuador, where access to healthcare is as challenging as anywhere. Up until recently, many communities of indigenous peoples in this area had no access whatsoever to healthcare. About seven years ago, CFHI funded the training of Health Promoters here. The Health Promoters are people from the villages who were trained to help with everything from prenatal care, to childbirth, to disease prevention.
On this trip, my companions and I walked deep into the jungle to experience first-hand the challenges of access to healthcare. The deeper we walked, the further back in time we trekked, leaving vehicles, electricity, modern tools, and modern communication behind us. We found people living in great harmony with the earth, as they have for many hundreds of years. I was so happy to see the Health Promoters and to hear of their work in the communities. After seven years, they have become accepted in their role by their own communities and by the regional medical professionals. Although unpaid, the Health Promoters are going strong and functioning well because of the positive difference they know they are making—such as managing malaria brigades, establishing medicinal plant gardens, and introducing preventative healthcare strategies—and the respect they have earned from their own people.
This is but one example of sustainable work - one of the goals of much of what we do. CFHI has just concluded a three-year initial training for Health Promoters in some remote villages in the foothills of the Himalayas. We hope for the same future success in these communities half a world away. By focusing on the strengths and assets of a community instead of just looking at what it needs, we hope to build on what is already working. This means starting small; here in the Amazon, this meant working with the natural leaders in each community, instead of, for example, bringing in a wave of volunteer community health outreach workers to blanket the jungle with an education campaign only to return to the United States after a few months or so.
Whether it is funding the creation of Health Promoters or grassroots community health projects, or providing new training for medical professionals in underserved communities, we see our role as helping a community to see its own strengths—what it has to build on—rather than seeing just its own neediness. We think this is a much healthier approach and one that produces long-range successes because the work, as in the case of these Health Promoters, becomes assimilated into the community very quickly. And of course these efforts provide extremely rich settings for our students—the medical professionals of tomorrow—to gain their first experiences of global health issues.
So, what will the next 15 years bring? I can’t exactly tell you because the communities will have to tell us as we go along. This is our commitment: we will not force our own agenda on developing communities, rather we will help them identify and call forth their own successes and build from there. It is actually harder work in the beginning, but it is work you can bank on for the future.
Sincerely,
Steve Schmidbauer
Executive Director
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