Global Health Leaders Conference

We just had our first weekend of virtual student presentations from the Global Health Leaders Conference at Johns Hopkins University.

We've heard about Polio, Alzheimer's, period poverty, and yes, I spoke about global health advocacy with phone calls to Senators. What did you expect?


One of the speakers on Sunday spoke about philanthropy
Credit: @ourworldsanimals on Instagram


This online conference has been a great experience, and I got to meet other students interested in global health. In fact, you already met Janvi Huria through her guest post on this blog, and I connected with her through this program!

At conferences like the GHLC, I love to learn from my peers and just be in awe of the amazing work they do in business, research, philanthropy, and advocacy. I also try to extend an invitation to take their work to the stage of federal-level advocacy. That's pretty much what I talk about every time I'm a presenter: how do we take the knowledge from this conference and tell Congress all about it?

"Today we donated ONE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED (1200) MEDICAL GRADE blue masks and FIVE HUNDRED (500) face shields to Paoli hospital!"
Credit: @ourworldsanimals on Instagram

The most important part of these conferences, though, is the opportunity to connect with like-minded students from across the country, or even the world. I alluded to this in my post about the RESULTS International Conference: over the years, my sister and I have made many friends within RESULTS, even if we only see them for a few days each year.

When you meet someone really cool at a conference, exchange contact information with them! You don't have to hand over your personal phone number, but even just connecting on LinkedIn or Instagram will give you a way to reach that person later and see what cool projects they're working on.

Conferences like this one are going on throughout the year, and many are offered online at an affordable cost (some are even free of charge). I encourage you to search for organizations that work on issues you care about, and see if they are having any regional, national, or international gatherings. I don't have a master schedule of every youth summit ever, but here's just a handful of organizations I know that offer conferences open to students (even if they're not specifically student summits):

Picture1.png
Donating gently used eyeglasses to a mission in Haiti is just one of many global health projects presented at the GHLC
credit: Katherine Holekamp

Action steps? Check out the recordings of these presentations to learn more about global health! They will be available soon at the conference YouTube channel. 

If you were at the Use Your Outside Voice webinar in March, my speech in the Johns Hopkins series gave an update on where we are with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and here's a new call script to our U.S. Senators:

“Hi, my name is ______ and I am a constituent. My ZIP code is ______. I am calling because as a student with an interest in global health, I am really worried about the disruption COVID-19 causes for global immunization against other diseases. Will Senator _____ urge Leadership to address the global pandemic by increasing our support for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance in any next relief legislation? Thank you.”

Many thanks to Glohea at Johns Hopkins University for this opportunity!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to lobby a member of Congress

Image
Lobbying is one of the most intense and effective advocacy actions! And it's no wonder- a face to face conversation with your member of Congress gives both parties the opportunity to be heard and understood, and speak in depth on their positions and room for compromise. There’s an idea many people have in their heads of a cartoonish, fancy-suited man with a briefcase sneaking around Capitol Hill and bribing politicians to represent his interest. I, too, think of that image with extreme distaste. Yes, there are paid lobbyists, but that’s not what I mean by a "lobby meeting" with volunteer constituents . “Lobbying” as a general concept gets its name from people who used to wait around in the lobby of the office building, hoping to snag a few minutes or even precious seconds of a lawmaker’s time to promote their cause. [A panorama taken while my family waited to meet with Senator Blunt. My mom appears three times in the shot, among the crowd waiting in the lobby.] These
Read more

Tuberculosis in the MCU

Image
Spoilers for  The Falcon and the Winter Soldier  episode 3! This probably won't make sense anyway if you haven't watched the show, so you've been warned... So, I've been back in the Marvel fandom for nearly 12 weeks, since the first episode of WandaVision. Meanwhile, I never stopped doing global health advocacy. While Monica and Sam become my favorite characters more and more every day, the tuberculosis epidemic is becoming more and more urgent. What can the two tuberculosis references in MCU canon teach us about the real-life epidemic? Image description: my attempts at doodling the COVID-19 virus and tuberculosis bacteria Tuberculosis (TB) is an airborne, infectious disease caused by bacteria that usually attack the lungs. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the number one infectious disease killer in the world, taking 1.4 million lives in 2019 and sickening 10 million . And it took a long time for COVID-19 to surpass TB- not until November 2020! TB is still bigge
Read more

Sunrise Launch Party

Image
Today, I hosted a launch party for the Sunrise Movement at my house. What’s a launch party , you say? To kick off a year of action for the Green New Deal and make sure that climate change is the number one election issue in America, it’s going to take a bigger movement of young people than ever before. That’s why across the nation, Sunrise held over 2500 “launch parties” within one week! Young people gather in living rooms, campuses, and libraries across the country to learn about the Green New Deal and pledge to participate in strikes this Earth Day. As active as I’ve been over the years, I’m still an introverted sixteen-year-old, and until today, I’d never hosted my own event by myself. Somehow, I took a leap of faith and ended up leading a meeting with nine other people, my first action as a part of Sunrise. Here’s the story of how that happened... Thursday, January 2: I get an email in my inbox from Sunrise, asking me to host a launch party. It’s about tim
Read more