good morning kick it's tuesday in your
last video you asked me how i traverse
the sad gap how i overcome feelings of
despair and discouragement and
helplessness in the face of big problems
and come to believe that something can
actually be done about them well today i
want to tell you a story so we started
working with partners in health in 2010
in response to an earthquake in haiti
which was one of the biggest news
stories in the world at the time so we
were focused on it because everyone was
focused on it as a community we felt
powerless before the immense suffering
caused by the earthquake and raising
money gave us a way to help but for me
anyway this strategy was insufficient
for a few reasons first the suffering
caused by the earthquake in haiti was
not caused at its core by an earthquake
it was caused by human choices and
human-built systems that had
impoverished haiti for centuries and so
when the earthquake came everything from
healthcare systems to infrastructure
systems were not strong enough to
address the crisis understanding that
the suffering caused by the earthquake
was not really a natural disaster helps
us to understand how to respond but
because i like many donors didn't
understand this a lot of the money that
was raised for earthquake relief in
haiti didn't even get spent in haiti and
most that did was spent on short-term
interventions some of which were very
important but they didn't strengthen
systems in a long-term way now
fortunately partners in health did make
long-term investments in the health care
system in haiti which is why today we
have the university hospital in mir
belay but just to be clear i wasn't
responsible for that i was all about
short-term thinking and short-term
solutions to merely natural disasters
the other issue is that a lot of our
philanthropy at the time was about us
our feelings of helplessness our desire
to do something it wasn't really
grounded in listening or becoming close
to the people affected by these crises
and so when the world's attention
shifted our attention shifted as well to
the tsunami in japan or to the syrian
refugee crisis or to the ebola crisis
because i didn't have a first priority
it felt to me like there were always new
crises and none of the old crises ever
got better which left me perpetually in
the sad gap and then my life changed in
2014 during a conversation with pih's
chief medical officer dr joya mukherjee
i said that during the project for
awesome we really wanted to raise money
for ebola response efforts and asked if
pih was going to be a part of that and
in response dr mukherjee explained to me
that 15
of sierra leone's healthcare workers had
already died of ebola and so if
charities came in and only stayed until
that crisis ended it would be
catastrophic because the health care
system in sierra leone would be even
more fragile than it was before the
crisis so yes she said we are going but
we are also staying we are staying to
help build a stronger healthcare system
so that the next catastrophe will be
less catastrophic and then she said and
we want to ask you to stay too and that
request changed my life staying learning
and listening through open-ended ongoing
commitments that's what helped me cross
the sad gap to understand that our
shared problems are tremendous but so is
our shared capacity for addressing them
now i want to be clear that raising
money to address crises is very
important but so is having priorities
and understanding that other people will
have other priorities like you can't go
deep on everything and the deeper you go
on one topic the more valuable you
become i've tried to go deep on maternal
and child health in west africa hank
goes deep on climate change our
colleague rosianna hoss rojos is getting
a master's degree in refugee studies our
priorities are different but because we
can learn from each other we all benefit
from each of us having priorities so i
think that is one way to cross the sad
gap choose priorities and try to go deep
not just by listening to podcasts and
reading books although that's very
important but attend meetings and
symposia to learn directly from the
people making the change because then
you will understand and believe that the
change is possible i'm gonna list some
other strategies people recommended in
the comments of hank's video in these
comments below please add to them hank
here's to traversing the sad gap
together i'll see you on friday