Partnerships for Disaster Relief Lead to Global Development Opportunities
In my post last week, I gave just a few examples on how partnerships with private corporations have been key to achieving Project HOPE’s mission of improving health for people around the world for the past 50 years. Today, I’d like to tell you about a specific humanitarian partnership that is facilitating global development.
In early 2005, immediately following the catastrophic Indian Ocean Tsunami, Project HOPE and the U.S. Navy formed a partnership to help the people of the devastated region. The Navy dispatched the USNS Mercy – a 1,000-bed hospital ship – to provide care to survivors of the disaster. Project HOPE sent 210 volunteer medical professionals, drawn from some of the leading U.S. medical and educational institutions, to serve alongside Navy counterparts on that mission. Our long-time corporate partners such as Abbott, Genzyme Corporation, Merck & Co., Inc., Eli Lilly & Company, Johnson & Johnson, Baxter International Foundation, Avon Products Foundation, Inc., and Pfizer, Inc., to name a few, donated more than $13 million of desperately needed medicines and medical supplies, as well as cash grants, to make the mission a success.
This first partnership between the U.S. Navy, Project HOPE and corporate partners not only served the immediate need of responding to health care needs of the people following this unprecedented disaster, but it set-up the infrastructure to help people in Southeast Asia with long-term recovery.
The partnership also contributed to bettering global relations. According to a BBC poll, almost 70 percent of the people in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation, viewed the U.S. with hostility before the tsunami. A Heritage Foundation poll, conducted after the tsunami mission, found 70 percent of Indonesians with a more favorable impression of the U.S.
The U.S. Navy, Project HOPE volunteers and corporate partners came together a second time in 2005, when a natural disaster stuck closer to home. Project HOPE volunteers mobilized quickly alongside their Navy counterparts on board the USNS Comfort in the Gulf Coast to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Again, the initial response led to longer-term recovery programs including a medical clinic building donated by Merck & Co., Inc., and equipment for a mobile dental clinic, provided by a Johnson & Johnson grant, to help people along the Mississippi Coast receive medical and dental services while permanent facilities were rebuilt. The mobile dental unit also provides dental readiness in the event of another debilitating Gulf storm.
Since partnering with the U.S. Navy and corporate partners to respond to international and domestic disasters, the successful collaboration has opened doors to annual missions to Latin America, Southeast Asia and West Africa to promote health education in countries around the world and treat people in need of health care.
More about the continuing partnership next week.
John P. Howe, III, M.D. is President and Chief Executive Officer of Project HOPE.
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