Tag Archives: conferences

Service Learning and the Strive for Social Justice

by Robin Young
Associate Program Director, Africa and Asia

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As a nonprofit organization offering international health programs to students, is it our job to incorporate social justice into our work?

How can we bring feminist perspectives into our programming?

Does research coming out of “the Academy” in the United States apply to our partners and colleagues in the Global South?

These are the types of questions that were explored at the annual International Association for Research on Service Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE) conference, held in New Orleans.

IARSCLE is an international non-profit organization devoted to promoting research and discussion about service-learning and community engagement, aimed to advance understanding of scholarship from international perspectives.

At CFHI we offer service learning components in many of our programs for health students whether it is engaging with an ongoing, locally-led nutrition project in southwestern Uganda, or offering educational trainings to youth in an addiction rehabilitation center in Delhi, India. A lot of what we know about best practices in service-learning come from members of the IARSLCE community.

Mid-wife training in Port Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico

Mid-wife training in Port Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico

CFHI has recently played an instrumental role in bringing patient safety (and specifically, service-learning projects in which under-qualified students practice medicine beyond their level of education) into focus within the IARSLCE community, highlighting important tools such as the Global Ambassadors for Patient Safety (GAPS) modules, among others.

This year, CFHI presented a session called “From Research to Practice: Service-Learning in Healthcare Settings,” which allowed us to explore the case for general and program-specific learning competencies; explore the ethics of global health service-learning through the lens of case studies; and climb into best practices that prioritize both patient and student safety in healthcare settings abroad. As is always the case when surrounded by brilliant colleagues, it was an opportunity to share knowledge and resources and continue to think about how CFHI and other program providers can ensure that we are helping students to be prepared for their global health experiences.

Refugees and the Desire for Education

by Caity Jackson
Director of European Engagement

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Unusually hot weather welcomed me to the town where The Beatles famously made their debut. Coincidentally, the theme of the conference was ‘Imagine’, with a strong emphasis of thinking outside of the box and engaging everyone’s imaginative side in relation to European and international education.

But ‘imagining international education’ had a more serious tone this year, with the presence of sessions focusing on refugee education and how to increase inclusivity in all aspects of the recruitment, delivery, and evaluation of the educational process. How are we making international education possible for all?

This year, the EAIE conference held a track focusing on refugee education, in an attempt to address and respond to the refugee crisis in Europe. These 13 events focused on fair admission, recognition of international educational attainments, and how Germany is responding to the influx of refugees through intercultural certifications and integration programs.

Not only being represented through sessions and posters, refugee education wove itself into the opening and closing plenary of the entire conference. Kilian Kleinschmidt began his keynote address with harrowing figures: 1.2 million people have been displaced from their homes over the last year, with the total budget available for all aid, including refugees, natural disaster assistance, etc, worldwide, adding up to approximately US$20 billion. “Compare that to the money spent on real estate development and you understand why aid is the wrong concept. Aid is an arrogant concept of charity”, Killian asserted.

Photo by: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development

Photo by: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development

‘Imagining’ again that education for all is within our grasps, sessions focused on overcoming the barriers international education recruiters/marketers, administrators, and alumni coordinators face when it comes to a mobile population. How can we value our prospective and current students and erase the dollar sign universities associate them with? How can we increase diversity on campus while ensuring students have all the services they need to succeed at their fingertips? In only a few days, participants left with imaginative answers, if not even more questions to guide their work.

Diversity has always been a focus of the work that CFHI has engaged in. We imagine a world in which there are no barriers to the enriching experience cross-cultural learning can give. Our many scholarships aim to address these barriers and we are proud of the breadth of diversity in our scholarship applicants and successful candidates and we are honoured to walk side by side with our partner organizations.

Wrapping up this event that saw over 5000 professionals from over 90 countries gather in the spirit of increased global cooperation, Melissa Fleming of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told stories of those that our work has not reached. These stories from some of the most dire situations of the world, where the hunger to learn is beyond any of our comprehensions, was the inspirational closing we needed. Melissa began her talk with an account of her experience taking her own daughter through the steps of studying in France. She then told us about Esther, a young refugee whose main aspiration is to become a neurosurgeon. The contrast, in terms of opportunities for these two equally young and motivated women, is evident. If education offers life opportunities, why are we failing to provide this to those who need it most? As Melissa put it: “my daughter’s future is in her hands, Esther’s is in ours.”

Ethical Dilemmas in Global Internships: Lessons from the GIC 2016

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by Robin Young
Assistant Director, Africa and Asia

“The first year that the Northeastern Students came to the Tunaweza Children’s Centre in Uganda, it was wonderful!” shares Titi Pamela Kakonge, founder of the Centre, which offers a range of therapies for children with disabilities. “But then they left, and all the local parents withdrew their children from our school. They thought that since the Mzungus (white people) had gone, the program was over.”

The vacuum left by the departing students was gaping, despite the fact that the Centre was led and staffed by a robust local team. After that, Ms. Kakonge and Northeastern University worked together to find ways to ensure that the community saw the local staff as the leaders and the teachers, not vice versa. Today the Centre runs year-round, successfully receiving interns from Northeastern and other institutions, with clear local leadership and well-defined job descriptions for the physical and speech therapy interns.

I heard Ms. Kakonge speak at the Global Internship Conference in Boston earlier in June, at a session titled “Tunaweza Children’s Centre- We Can: An Interprofessional, International Partnership with Northeastern University’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences.”  Ms. Kakonge founded the Centre while searching for adequate care and services for her daughter who was born with disabilities. The challenge that she highlighted above has been well documented.

Pamela Roy, Farzana Karim-Haji, and Robert Gough call this the ‘revolving door’ nature of exchange between students and hosts, and propose several ideas for host communities to address this ethical dilemma, all of which Northeastern is now utilizing. They suggest making certain that students are sufficiently prepared for the experience, taking steps to ensure that host community needs are truly being met through the internship, and equipping students to listen, observe, and learn from the host community.

During their session at the GIC, Roy, Kaim-Haji, and Gough, drawing on their experiences at Aga Khan University, Western University, and the Consultancy for Global Higher Education, highlighted a new, open-access resource they have developed, titled “Building Ethical Global Engagement with Host Communities: North-South Collaborations for Mutual Learning and Benefit.” In it, they compile recent findings and summarize the ethical dilemmas that challenge all of us who engage in North-South Global Internships, including mobility inequality (in which students from the north have more access to the south in terms of professional development and career opportunities than vice versa); exploitation of the host community as research participants; and unethical marketingand advertisement to promote global internships, to name a few. The resource offers definitions of these dilemmas and offers a series of recommendations that can help all of us in the field to improve our global internship offerings.

At CFHI, we’re always thinking about how to offer internships that, to quote a recent publication on short-term global health experiences, “Optimize community benefit and learner experience.” From where we stand, an internship should only take place if we can ensure that it benefits, within an ethical framework, our partners around the world, as well as the intern.  We do this by engaging in fair trade learning practices, ensuring that our partners are fairly compensated for their work and have substantial leadership and input into all internships and programming; by requiring our participants and interns to complete the Global Ambassadors for Patient Safety modules, preparing them to engage in ethical medical practice that prioritizes patient safety at all times; and by inserting interns into existing healthcare and social service systems, with local leaders who focus on assets rather than deficits in their communities. I had the opportunity to share some of these resources during a session at the GIC alongside Moira Mannix Votel, Associate Co-op Coordinator & Director of Cooperative Education at Northeastern University’s Bouve College Cooperative Education.

At CFHI, we strive to close the ‘revolving door’ referred to earlier.  It is important to us to create leaders for the future who understand a larger view of the world beyond their own.  We are continuously pushed and encouraged by the input of our colleagues in this field and look forward to moving this conversation forward at any opportunity.


Rorobinyoungphotobin joined the CFHI team in 2015. As Assistant Director, Africa and Asia, she provides program management and support for CFHI’s programs, helping to ensure program safety and quality, best practices in international education, and strong institutional and global partnerships. Robin’s professional background includes extensive work in international education, global health, and asset-based development. Robin holds an MBA from Florida International University and a BA in Sociology/Anthropology with a minor in Ethnic Studies from Lewis and Clark College. She completed a course at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication, helping to inform her interest in increasing intercultural competency in global work and education, and subsequently co-authored the Cultural Detective Dominican Republic series. Robin received a Fulbright Fellowship grant in 2007 and spent a year researching gender-based violence in the Dominican Republic, where she ended up living for nearly 5 years. Robin is passionate about supporting thoughtful, ethical and asset-based strategies to address health disparities and support underserved communities. She lives in the Bay Area and loves backpacking, riding her bike, and spending time with family and friends.