Community Conversation with Dr. Paul Farmer
On Monday, November 9, Facing History and Ourselves and the Allstate Foundation hosted a Community Conversation in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival featuring Dr. Paul Farmer in conversation with Facing History students at Northwestern University’s Thorne Auditorium in downtown Chicago. This event was presented as part of our 2009 International Board Retreat, and nearly 200 of Facing History’s board members from around the world attended. With traveling and Chicago Facing History staff, students, teachers, and other community members, there were nearly 250 Facing History guests in an audience of over 800, making this our largest Community Conversation in Chicago to-date.
Before the event, Farmer met with the Chicago Student Leadership Team, who had read Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, which chronicles Farmer’s life. Farmer and the students engaged in a discussion of how they as students can make a positive impact in the world in which they live. The Community Conversation was opened by Stuart Flack, Executive Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival, who shared what a privilege it was for them to partner with Facing History. Victoria Dinges, Assistant Vice President of Public and Social Responsibility and Enterprise Communications for Allstate, underscored the value of the Community Conversations partnership to the Allstate Foundation. Facing History’s President and Executive Director Margot Stern Strom then introduced Farmer.
Farmer gave the audience a glimpse of the day-to-day work of Partners in Health, the organization he founded with the mission to provide basic health services in Haiti and break the cycle of poverty and disease there and around the world. He emphasized the important role of the individual and how important impacting individuals’ lives is to the work he does. He discussed how Partners in Health has scaled up these individual successes, and turned them into an infrastructure that allows his organization to deliver services and conduct training and research in Haiti and rural Africa. He then connected his work to Chicago by highlighting the city’s founder, Haitian immigrant Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable. After Farmer’s lecture, Facing History students from the Student Leadership Team joined him on stage to ask questions and engage in a conversation.
The event was an excellent opportunity to showcase Facing History’s partnership with Allstate to board members from around the country as well as to the Chicago Humanities Festival, many of whom were new to Facing History. The audience was inspired by Farmer’s choice to participate in making this a safer, healthier world.
