Bringing power and food to communities

WKKF grantee Build Health International (BHI) constructs health infrastructure in low-resource settings. BHI has long recognized the need for solar power at health facilities in Haiti, where generator use is high due to an absence of reliable electricity grids. With gas more expensive and harder to access, that need has grown increasingly urgent. As Olivia Duggan, BHI’s manager for external projects and initiatives, wrote on Medium, her organization worked with WKKF grantee Partners in Health to equip the University Hospital of Mirebalais to be the “largest solar-powered teaching hospital in any low-and-middle income country” – and BHI is now upgrading and expanding the solar capabilities it established for the hospital. Cue SNAP!: “I’ve got the power!”

August 9 was the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, and the theme this year was Indigenous women’s role in transmitting traditional knowledge. La Jornada Maya published a profile of a woman who perfectly embodies that theme: Francisca Moo Yah, a graduate of the U Yits Ka’an in Maní, a school of ecological agriculture in Yucatán, Mexico. There she expanded her grasp of ancestral knowledge about growing food and medicine and learned ways to share it with other communities. WKKF supports Cultura Agrícola Integral, the organization behind the school, in its work to increase Mayan families’ access to local food. 

JULIAN, a WKKF grantee and civil rights and human rights organization, has filed a lawsuit and requested a federal investigation of systemic racism in the police department in Lexington, Mississippi. This comes after JULIAN obtained an audio recording of the police chief using racist and homophobic slurs, which led to his firing. We continue to stand in solidarity with the Lexington community.

Alaska and Minnesota have both “demonstrated that dental therapists can provide competent dental care to vulnerable and underserved populations in a cost-effective manner.” That’s according to the Advisory Committee on Training in Primary Care Medicine and Dentistry, which is tasked by the Human Resources Service Administration to recommend policy and programs. In a new report, the advisory committee recommends increasing federal support for dental therapy as an effective way to deliver dental care to the estimated 67 million individuals living in areas in the U.S. where there are shortages of dental care. The committee was informed by experts in the field, including WKKF grantees Valerie Davidson, J.D., president, Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium; and Caswell Evans, D.D.S., M.P.H., professor emeritus, Pediatric Dentistry, Prevention and Public Health, University of Illinois, Chicago.

The BBC’s Business Daily released the interview it conducted with La June Montgomery Tabron when she was in the U.K. to deliver the 2022 Bynum Tudor Lecture at Kellogg College, Oxford. During her discussion with the BBC’s Vivienne Nunis, Tabron discussed her own personal story, WKKF’s racial equity journey and the need for systemic change in the United States and around the world. Give it a listen to hear from our president and CEO.