After playing a game of human knots, we made a few announcements at our last meeting. With regards to GHI, we discussed our new memorandum of understanding (MOU) and this year’s fundraising goal: to finance the program of one health center for one full year. We also discussed a J-term graphic internship internship opportunity that GHI will be offering in Boston (email us if you’re interested!). In addition, if any graphic designers would like to help GHI complete their annual report, please get in touch with us! We also announced the new Unite for Sight chapter that has just been started at Midd.
After those announcements, we had a discussion about our first ever Hilltop, which our chapter universally considered a success. We discussed the pluses and minuses of that weekend; positives included Dr. Rishi Rattan’s incredible opening keynote and Dr. Hiba Salih’s interesting lecture. Many staff members also appreciated David Egilman’s incendiary talk because, as one student put it, “he made us think more carefully about what we’re doing.” Perry Dougherty’s lecture on “resilience” in global health was another favorite, but one student suggested we might have placed her talk earlier in the conference to frame the rest of the weekend’s events. The breakout sessions were also considered valuable, particularly GHI Executive Director Jessie Cronan’s, but due to the overall fast pace of the hilltop, some people felt they had lost steam by the second session. Another negative was that of the 20 originally registered delegates from other colleges, none showed up–a disappointing display on the part of those GlobeMed chapters. Still, our overall successes were detailed in a wonderful front-page article printed in the Middlebury Campus, not to mention the article we posted earlier from the GlobeMed Current.
For GlobalHealthU, we talked about the relationship between human rights and the law. Points we discussed included the fallibility of laws and the differences among nations with regard to what constitutes a “human right.” This discussion led into a more specific consideration of the recent judicial hearing conducted against five students who called themselves the Dalai Lama Welcoming Committee and sent out a fake press release to the Middlebury College community. (Read the MiddBlog post about this here.)
We then broke up into campaign teams to prep for our upcoming Two Brothers event and holiday giving campaign. Both are shaping up to be awesome fundraising opportunities!