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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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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