Heart to Heart
The ICHA Blog
Nikka Rapkin, ICHA’s co-founder and executive director, spends her days as a litigation associate of a large law firm in San Francisco. In law school, she co-directed UC Berkeley’s law student outreach program, managing over fifty active volunteers to provide legal services to homeless and low income residents of Alameda County. She continues to sustain an active pro bono practice focusing on domestic violence and immigration issues.
In Ghana, Nikka will oversee ICHA’s community program team and meet with Ghanaian political and healthcare leaders to discuss how ICHA can partner with existing educational, political, and health institutions to galvanize a more widespread effort against cardiovascular disease.
In her spare time, Nikka is an avid guitarist and backpacker.
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“You Are Welcome” |
Sitting by the Volta River in Sogakope, watching the heat lightning and trying not to think too hard about the mosquitos. Grateful the sun has gone down, grateful for the breeze, grateful and more than a little awestruck that we get to do the work we do.
I arrived in Sogakope yesterday, in a tightly packed van – half people/half rice/half market miscellany (if you counted 150% full, that's because it was) – and, within hours, was taken in by the community's hospitality and disbelief that ICHA has been working in Ghana for 1.5 years and has not yet come to Sogakope. So today was spent trying to remedy this, to evaluate launch of a new pilot program, to build the necessary foundation and troubleshoot potential barriers, so we can kick off asap. Ghanaians like swift action. If you have a good idea, let's go. For today's purposes, that meant a lot of driving, not nearly enough water, and a lot of meetings – with secondary school head masters, the director of Sogakope District Hospital, the public health coordinator at Ghana Education Services, teachers, a director at Ghana Health Services, just to name a few – all enthusiastic and all repeating (after hearing what we're about): "Ah, you are welcome. It is good you are here."
It's interesting to see in practice the things you learn in theory. A keystone to a strong community program – in Ghana and probably any other community – is understanding who the community respects and establishing relationships with the local leaders. If they agree with your mission, they will introduce you to the folks you need to know, explain your purpose and onward you go. Each community has its own systems (Sogakope is so different than Elmina!), but the basic principles are the same.
So, it seems, are some of the basic principles of Ghanaian culture. Inasmuch as someone from Eastern Region might tell you that people from Volta are different ("transparent and very loyal," for example), the enthusiasm for knowledge and its incredibly swift absorption, the commitment to health and community betterment, the excitement about programs like ICHA's is the same here as it was in Elmina. So, people don't know about heart health – "many don't even know that the food they eat impacts their body" (this is a direct quote from a teacher I spoke with today).
But people here want to know and they embrace you (literally) for coming and bringing this information. (And you get tears in your eyes, because you're just a catalyst for information that everyone has a right to without having to ask for it.) And you know that the information you are working with your new partners to spread will have a tangible impact on people's lives – not just thousands but hundreds of thousands. So how could you not want to just keep coming back to Ghana until you are entirely sure that every community that wants it has the basic information about health that we take for granted? And how do you sleep at night knowing that people die because nobody told them? And how do you go back to practicing law when you see how simple it is to make friends and make change?
I should end this here. But I want to impart (and know I can't) the overwhelmingly engaging power of this culture. The respect I have for the people I have met here. The profound sense of dismay at Ghana's poverty and the simple unfairness of it all, that most people have very little, that daily life is really – deeply – hard, that people die too young in this place. And that, through our alliances, we really have the opportunity to make things better.
-Nikka
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Another Open Letter to ICHA |
Dear team –
A year and a half ago, I wrote my first open letter to ICHA. We were launching our initial program in Ghana (training roughly 40 health workers at the Elmina Urban Health Centre) and conducting community assessment and reconnaissance for our second (what was to became the secondary school classroom curriculum and clubs initiative). That letter was a congratulations to our volunteers (many of whom are still with us today!) whose passion had made ICHA happen, and confirmation that the work we are doing is important and – if we do it right – will have an impact beyond what we can even imagine.
It's only a year and a half later and in forty-eight hours we will be launching our fourth program – a mobile technology pilot that applies basic, readily-available technology to solve a complex challenge in a creative and efficient way.
Also during the weeks ahead we will be meeting with community leaders and conducting teacher and student focus groups to further develop our secondary school classroom curriculum, providing students essential information about health and nutrition and empowering these students to educate their families and communities.
We will be assessing the impact of our clinical program, evaluating opportunities to create capacity for cardiovascular disease prevention and working with nurses to ensure that the patients who come to the clinic – one in three of whom is hypertensive – have access to basic information and treatment to prevent disease.
We will be working with student-run ICHA heart health clubs to sponsor a community-wide event to conduct blood pressure screenings and promote cardiovascular health awareness.
We will be meeting with the WHO, Family Health International, Doctors for a Right to Health, and ministerial officers and directors in health and education to evaluate potential partnerships and strategies to expand the reach of these programs to communities throughout Ghana.
And that's just a taste.
We – you, oh amazing ICHA'ers – put these programs together in record time, in your spare time, committing evenings and weekends and lunch breaks to meetings and research, hunting down resources and consulting experts to ensure our programs are the best they can be – not to mention developing organizational systems and strategies to turn our ICHA into a full-blown sustainable non-profit.
Thanks to you, this means we can operate major programs on a minor (barely breathing) budget. And this means we get to do things no other organization can – like develop and implement creative, evidence-based cardiovascular health programs in poor communities when funders still refuse to acknowledge that these diseases are one of the most devastating global health challenges of our generation. You guys are amazing and this outreach is going to be huge.
Congratulations, everyone.
I'm on the plane and getting excited.
Till soon,
Nikka
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An Open Letter to ICHA |
My dearest ICHA’ers,
Good morning, everyone!
It is roughly 7:30 here, still just after midnight back in CA, and ICHA’s first outreach is in Ghana!
As we speak, Sujatha is preparing for a formal meeting with the district head of medicine and for ICHA’s second day of health worker trainings in the clinic. Our program development team is setting out their contingency plan for the day in the event that their meeting with the chief of Elmina gets postponed till tomorrow. A group of our clinicians is out on an early morning health outreach in a small village outside of Elmina, taking blood pressure and encouraging people with hypertension to come into the clinic to get treated by the workers we are training. I’m sitting outside, watching women walk past in bright dresses and with assorted everythings on their heads, and preparing to travel to Accra for meetings with Dr. Boateng, the President of the Ghanaian branch of the World Heart Federation and CEO of the Korle Bu teaching hospital and, later, with a colleague from USAID. Busy morning.
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So, my friends, I’m not quite sure where to begin. I came on this outreach, after nearly 16 months of preparation, half believing that we would arrive and find that we’d misjudged. That we’d be overwhelmed with a level of poverty we simply couldn’t impact, problems we weren’t prepared to solve, that cardiovascular health was the wrong answer, a misallocation of resources and ICHA’s spirit of well meaning.
Not so. Really, really not so.
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ICHA: Coming of Age |
So much to write about these days, I'm not quite sure where to start. I'll begin with those issues most pressing.
Namely: ICHA has it's first big fundraiser this week -- on Friday. If you haven't heard about it -- and we very much hope you already have --it's at the Museum of the African Diaspora on Mission and Third. Our team has been doing everything a young nonprofit can to get the word out, but still, it's an uphill battle to cobble together the foundation of support necessary to make this organization what it could be. We hope you can join us -- it is absolutely essential that we have a good turnout, and filling a whole museum is a daunting task.
On the other hand, daunting tasks are what we do. We were featured in a local SF blog this week: http://iliveheresf.blogspot.com/2009/09/icha.html. Although the blog typically profiles individuals, Julie -- master photographer of i live here -- kindly agreed to profile ICHA as an organization. She took a gorgeous snapshot at our BBQ last weekend and, there we are (or some of us), along with our story.
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It’s finally here |
Wow. It’s finally here.
January 2008 certainly seems like a long time ago. Back when the recession was merely an apocalyptic prediction and Obama appeared to be in a losing struggle for the democratic primary. Things change quickly.
January 2008 was also the month Sujatha and I launched ICHA. She had a brilliant idea, I had a passion for nonprofit management, just add water and a 501(c)(3) application and there you go. Ok. Not exactly. We certainly knew that kicking off a nonprofit from scratch would be toil incarnate and unimaginable and that we would have to search high and low to create a team with the expertise to pull it all off. We also knew that we were in for an uphill battle, since cardiovascular disease in the developing world is such a shockingly under-appreciated crisis. (The fact that CVD costs developing nations billions of dollars annually seems truly to be one of the best kept public health secrets around.)
Continue reading "It’s finally here" »
About ICHA
The International Cardiovascular Health Alliance (ICHA) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to promoting cardiovascular health in the developing world. ICHA works closely with local clinics and community organizations to provide knowledge and tools to prevent cardiovascular disease.
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