-Ron Lapitan, Former Community Outreach Coordinator
Today, the Center for Health and Human Rights’ staff were privileged to meet with Dr. Alicia Yamin who took time to visit our clinic. A professor of law at Georgetown University and leading scholar on health and human rights, she has worked in countries around the world studying issues such as poverty and the health impacts of gender inequality.
She is interested in supporting our high school program, sharing our philosophy that youth are particularly important to engage in the dream of a culture of health and human rights because the values of the youth will become the culture of the future. “I think youth are the experts about what it is like to live in their reality. They just need to be given the words to tell their stories,” she said.
In between her work with the UN and other social development groups, she has graciously agreed to commit time to meeting with our high school teams throughout the year, especially our ESL students, to learn about their experience and empower them to cultivate their voice to articulate their experience of human rights or lack thereof.
As she left, she autographed our copy of her latest book on our office bookshelf, “Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity: Human Rights Frameworks for Health and Why They Matter.”
“In development and social policy, health has conventionally been construed in terms other than ‘as a right,’ so it is worth exploring what it would mean for… anyone – to claim health as a right.”
-Dr. Yamin, Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity
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