Ophelia Dahl - Co-founder, chair of the Board - Partners In Health | LinkedIn. They met while volunteering for separate organizations in Haiti. This is mission creep, or whatever. The owner and president of construction company J.F. First: If you could change one thing about how things work, what would it be?OPHELIA DAHL: We’ve been able to accomplish a lot, but I am still, we are having the same conversations at the board level, and amongst ourselves, and with a general audience, about the fact that we don’t have enough resources to do what we really want to do, and I think we have loads of generous people, who’ve jumped into this work in extraordinary ways. PAUL FARMER: Well, this is a particular place, Frank. At least that’s been, I think, very helpful to us.OPHELIA DAHL: I would say that there’s no question that going, seeing progress, and at this point, there’s such a focus, Frank, these days, on the relatively quick solution. You can’t, I don’t believe, and so just like in Haiti. Partners In Health receives 90.22 out of 100 for their Charity Navigator rating. How do you sustain optimism in the face of all that you see, and all the needs that you see that need to be met, and just the work in front of you?PAUL FARMER: Well, in terms of the list you just gave Frank, for us, it’s all of the above, and we mention other parts of that list. He has received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, has been recognized as one of America’s “25 Best Leaders” by Todd McCormack is a founding board member of Partners In Health and a senior corporate vice president at IMG Media, the largest independent producer and distributor of sports programming in the world. They heard their land was going to be flooded. Can you go through what’s embedded in those seemingly straightforward concepts?PAUL FARMER: It takes a long time to make a difference, really, with any pressing social problem. With so many needs worldwide, how do you decide to go where you’re going next? I remember her emailing us, or texting, and saying I’m going to get that bridge out of that storage, so it took a long time, and a number of emergencies, and, unfortunately, we mustn’t forget, a number of people died, because they really couldn’t reach medical services, but, in the end, you also have to be able to close your ears to this chorus of complaint, and criticism. White Contracting Co., he helped found PIH with his first $1 million donation and then systematically gave away his wealth—tens of millions of dollars—by selling his company, his assets, and his house to continue supporting PIH projects aimed at alleviating human suffering and poverty. It’s not like we can’t imagine our own kids going to university, or we can’t imagine having safe shelter, or can’t imagine being spared a plague for ourselves, and our families, so why can’t we imagine that for other people who’ve been shut out of material modernity, or being in some other ways punished by where they were born, or who they were? In Port-au-Prince, and then I would go out on these outreach trips. Well, there is a university there now, and so, again, having recently been there, it’s also a beautiful university, I might add, and Ophelia already mentioned, it’s called the University of Global Health Equity. I would just say one other thing, with a nod to our friend Jim Kim, who always reminded us, and as we heard in Peru, and Mexico, and Haiti, is people don’t want to live in poverty, so the big picture intervention is to get rid of poverty, and that requires a series of interventions that are not going to happen largely within hospital walls, and he’s been particularly committed to that. Today Ophelia is chair of Partners In Health while Paul, in addition to his work for the organization, is a physician and chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is a member of CommonAngels, a group that invests in innovative information technology companies, and an advisor to Livestream.Since its beginning, Tom White enabled Partners In Health to do “whatever it takes” to improve the lives and health of patients in destitute communities around the world, whether financing the construction of a small clinic in Cange, purchasing a microscope, or paying $30,000 per patient for PIH’s first multidrug-resistant tuberculosis program.
He previously served as CEO of TWI Interactive, an independently financed IMG company that managed IMG’s new media rights from 1999-2003. Friends, people we care about doing the same work, encouraging each other. I think the difference was, for me, that I was introduced to Paul and a group of people, and it felt as though I wanted to just apply myself in my way. We’re walking with people. Partners In Health is rated 4 out of 4 stars by Charity Navigator. In fact, as far as we could tell, the only way to get over a swollen river is with a bridge, I guess, or a raft. They were thinking, “How are they going to flood the land? There’s actually less of that these days, and there’s much more of would you come here, or there?