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-Ron Lapitan, Former Community Outreach Coordinator

This week, we’re developing the Gender Equality unit of the curriculum for the high school students in our Health as Right after school program, which teaches them about developing communities towards a culture of health and human rights.

One social action principle they will learn about is that complete cultural change can only occur with a mutual transformation of both structures and values, and that development is incomplete if change only centers on one. For example, 28 African countries practice female genital mutilation (FGM), the painful circumcision of girls’ reproductive organs as a rite of passage into womanhood, leading to several health problems throughout life. Many of these countries have had laws banning this practice for decades, yet it continues for a majority of women because it is a deeply ingrained part of peoples’ family values and social norms.

Another social action principle students will learn about is consultation. When it comes to promoting often contentious ideals such as supporting girls to get their education, to choose when and who they marry, and abolishing practices such as FGM, consultation is a method of engaging universal participation of a community’s members to talk about its own reality, and to make educated decisions based on their desires for the well-being of the place where they live. Consultation creates the needed transformation at the level of values, and ensures that communities are united in implementing changes in culture.

To learn what these principles might look like in practice, the students will do a case study of Tostan, a West-African organization which addresses FGM by starting participatory conversations about FGM with the generality of a community’s members, educating them about its health impacts, engaging them to express their own experiences of gender inequality and learn from the experiences of others, and then trusting in their capacity to make positive decisions for their community once they are educated about the reality of gender issues.

As a result of their participatory models, Tostan boasts that:

• 3m+ communities have publicly declared an end to FGM
• 7500+ communities have publicly declared their daughters will not marry before they are 18
• 20k+ women have been selected for leadership roles in their communities

“Women aren’t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.”

-Half the Sky, journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

#healthasright #youthteams

-Ron Lapitan, Former Community Outreach Coordinator

My energy at work has been devoted to developing the curriculum for our high school leaders lately. While our doctors see free patients in the bustling clinic, I sit in the backroom writing, typing, and scrapping. When I need ideas, I take a brainstorming walk in the apartments behind our clinic.

The curriculum outlines principles learned from participation in various community building programs and movements for effective social action that is organic, systematic, and non-adversarial, the kind we want our high school students to live to pursue. Their goal: to build a culture of health and human rights.

One principle is engaging universal participation. The field of development is replete with interventions which revolve around an external group entering a community to offer aid, which the community passively receives, and then leaving. Development of this kind suffers four inadequacies: 1. Solutions are often disconnected from the actual needs and reality of the community. 2. They don’t actually build the community’s capacity to address its own reality, thus solutions are only short-term because they rely on outside resources. 3. They don’t create change on the level of values because they don’t engage people to examine their own beliefs and ways of life. 4. They often have a narrow definition of development which divides communities into “developed” and “undeveloped,” largely based on material standards of progress. But when it comes to problems such as climate change, which is the subject of one of the curriculum’s modules, to which “developed” countries contribute the greatest to while “undeveloped” communities suffer most from the health and human rights impacts, which communities are in greater need of development and a reexamination of our patterns of life?

To lead a social movement based on universal participation, the second principle is a focus for building capacity in individuals. This involves reexamining one’s understanding of human nature, which impacts the methods one chooses to try to create change. For example, if one’s understanding is that humans are self-interested, finding our greatest motivation in self-maximization, are we not likely to choose solutions that revolve around superficial incentivization, such as encouraging a community to send its daughters to school by providing a financial reward? Imagine instead seeing individuals as mines filled with gems of inestimable value, having everything we need to create a different kind of world; such as talents and skills, a desire for change, and a sense of justice. Finding our greatest joy in being connected with others and to a higher purpose. Then solutions would attempt to tap into this inherent desire and potential, such as a group of neighbors creating spaces of conversation for community members to discuss their experience of gender norms, and the importance of sending local girls to school to the community’s progress.

To effectively build capacity, the third principle is seeing potential in others. This involves a commitment both to searching for the strengths in others and not being fixated on their faults. It understands that what we see in the world as imperfection, and even as corruption and evil, has no constructive substance of its own on which to build from. They are like darkness, which has no substance and is only what fills the space in the absence of light. In the same way, ignorance is only the absence of education, disunity the absence of unity, apathy the absence of inspiration, and hate the absence of love. If one wishes to rid the world of darkness and affect fundamental change, there is no foundation on which to do it simply by decrying and cursing the darkness. Darkness can only be dissipated by cultivating light.

I get excited, thinking about the next generation with a new imagination of change.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
-Martin Luther King Jr.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
-Abraham Lincoln

#healthasright #youthteams