Social Media and Training the Next Generation of Global Health Leaders

This afternoon, I'll be joining the inaugural class of Global Health Corps fellows at Stanford University for a session on social media.

Recent Echoing Green fellow Global Health Corps is a fellowship for young people from around the world who want to dedicate themselves to a new era of global health equity. Building off of the undergraduate training experiences offered by programs like FACE AIDS (who have a direct generative relationship with GHC), GlobeMed, Global Medical Brigades, and more, GHC places recent graduates with partner organizations around the world for a year-long, hands-on health education.

Their partners include Partners in Health, the Clinton Global Initiative's HIV/AIDS initiative, Village Health Works and more. From their website:

GHC aims to build a pipeline of new global health leaders by giving promising young leaders the opportunity to become a part of a network of peers engaged in meaningful work around the world. To achieve its mission, GHC will recruit skilled fellowship teams, provide additional training for fellows in basic epidemiology to enhance their technical skills, and place teams with selected partner organizations delivering services around the world. After working with these organizations for one year, fellows will engage in a post-field reflection forum. GHC will also maintain an alumni network so that fellows will benefit from the GHC community throughout their careers.

By recruiting recent university graduates from the United States and the countries where our partner organizations are working, and by placing recruited fellowship teams in geographically diverse locations around the world, GHC will be truly international in character. In its pilot year, GHC will match 12 American fellows with 12 in-country fellows in teams of two with six partner NGOs. By the third year of operations, GHC intends to send 75 American and 75 in-country fellows to work with 25 partner sites around the world.

I'm going to be talking about blogging and social media. Part of the talk will just be the basic tips of the trade that one can't help but pick up after doing this for a while. But part of the conversation will be more meta and focused on why social media matters.

The global health system is one of the most fundamental interconnected superstructures in the world today. Disease and epidemics spread without any respect for borders. Legal processes in one country can fundamental impact another's access to drugs. Health systems require governments, private enterprise, and civil society to work in sync.

But that's a complicated picture, and one that's not necessarily easily accessible in the quick soundbytes and snippets of news we've become used to. Social media such as blogging allows any individual passionate about and involved in work promoting global health equity to become a publisher who can tell a real time, evolving and ongoing story about the complication, challenge, and promise of the global health system. The strength of the medium is that it is fundamentally additive, and an honest blog supported by Facebook and Twitter can become a window to understanding.