National Academies’ Roundtable on Population Health Improvement “Faith – Health Collaboration to Improve Population Health Workshop.” Shaw University, Raleigh, NC. March 22. REGISTER HERE
Workshop exploring faith-based assets and population health
By Gary Gunderson
How do we work with those social structures of faith in collaboration with government and private entities such as hospitals? Good question. That’s exactly the question that the National Academies of Science Roundtable on Population Health is addressing on March 22nd in a special workshop exploring faith-based assets and population health.
The free, one-day public workshop will explore challenges and opportunities for health sector actors that engage with “faith-based health assets.” These organizations and social structures, in the form of congregations and religious community service networks, collaborate with others in communities, including health systems and public health agencies, to improve the conditions for health and well-being. There will be voices of many faiths including Muslim, Jewish Sikh, B’hai and varieties of Christian.
Please visit the registration page to sign up for the workshop or the live webcast and visit our meeting page for more information (additional resources will be posted before the workshop).
Shaw University is the perfect place to explore this beyond the chirpy happy talk that often marks discussions of collaboration. Shaw sprung from the bitterly tough minded hope of the post-Civil War black faith, barely around the corner from slavery at the hands of white Presbyterians. They knew racism of every kind–structural, informal, legal, illegal, cultural, subtle and full-bodied screaming, complete with the strange fruit of lynching. And so they created a school. This included a school for preachers, but those preacher-students helped lay the bricks for a school of medicine.
Almost at the same time Harvard did, Shaw had a four-year school with a hospital on campus. That school was closed by the Flexner Commission, which was charged with standardizing medical education, but went one lap further, taking the opportunity to scrub out nearly all the annoyingly persistent and impertinent Black schools. Wake Forest, up the road with a far lesser story, made it through, so we have the $3 Billion medical center today, not Shaw. Strange institutional fruit, indeed. Yet Shaw persists in its hopeful work today as the embodiment—not of an institutional lynching—but of tough-minded, “gonna-find-a-way” equipping of the People.
Consider coming to Shaw on March 22nd. Who knows what will happen? Who knows what we’ll be able to see together? I suspect we’ll help each other find our bearings.
