White Contracting Co., he helped found PIH with his first $1 million donation and then systematically gave away his wealth—tens of millions of dollars—by selling his company, his assets, and his house to continue supporting PIH projects aimed at alleviating human suffering and poverty.
IMAGE DISTRIBUTED FOR WELLESLEY COLLEGE - Ophelia Dahl, co-founder of Partners In Health and Wellesley Class of 1994, at the launch of the $500 Million Campaign for Wellesley College in … At least that’s been, I think, very helpful to us.OPHELIA DAHL: I would say that there’s no question that going, seeing progress, and at this point, there’s such a focus, Frank, these days, on the relatively quick solution. Ophelia Dahl Executive Director, Partners in Health – April 22 Ophelia Dahl, who is the daughter of famed children’s author Roald Dahl, has been a strong advocate for the rights and health of the poor for over three decades. I think that it’s a different narrative than saying young people come into medical school, nursing school, or whatever, with a lot of convictions, and then they dissipate over time. What do you think was it that kept you on the path, that made the path so compelling, that you committed to it, or was that something embedded in yourselves from the start?PAUL FARMER: I, as a medical professor now, as opposed to a medical student, I’m quite struck by how many medical students come in with those convictions, but I’m also struck by how many are able to sustain those convictions over time. | © 2009 - 2020 Partners In Health. Partners In Health is a Boston-based nonprofit health care organization founded in 1987 by Paul Farmer, Ophelia Dahl, Thomas J. Jim Yong Kim, M.D., Ph.D., is vice chairman and partner at Global Infrastructure Partners.
Today Ophelia is chair of Partners In Health while Paul, in addition to his work for the organization, is a physician and chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. I’m not sure I knew why, but that year, in between college and medical school, changed me profoundly.FRANK BLAKE: I suspect though, that a lot of people might start medical school thinking I’m going to use this for a deeper purpose, and greater good, or spend, as in your case Ophelia, spend a year, or some time in a country like Haiti, but then return to a more well-trodden path. I recently came back from Sierra Leone, and, as Paul said, you only have to think back 20 years, and imagine that place in the midst of a civil war, or Liberia, and then cast your mind back a few years ago to Ebola, and now to go there. I think it’s a very quick way for a deep dive.OPHELIA DAHL: Spent 10 years actually making it altogether, and it was interrupted by the earthquake, but I think that one way and Paul is right to mention this if people were interested in doing a screening. It’s not like we can’t imagine our own kids going to university, or we can’t imagine having safe shelter, or can’t imagine being spared a plague for ourselves, and our families, so why can’t we imagine that for other people who’ve been shut out of material modernity, or being in some other ways punished by where they were born, or who they were? You can’t, I don’t believe, and so just like in Haiti. What’s in the future for Partners In Health?OPHELIA DAHL: Well, I have to say that’s an exciting question for us, and I’m smiling, because on the one hand it’s true, and I was thinking, actually, with that statement, about we go.