Tonight: Med student Caitlin Cohen ’08 vies for $100K ‘Do Something Award’ on television
Caitlin Lee Cohen ’08, a PLME student in the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University, is one of nine youth activists from among more than 1,000 candidates vying for the $100,000 Do Something Award, to be conferred tonight (August 4) at the annual Teen Choice Awards hosted by pop star Miley Cyrus and shown at 8 pm EST on Fox.
“I am thrilled for the recognition this honor will bring to our project and its more than 200 volunteers,” Cohen says. “If we win the $100,000 award, we can build a clinic serving 30,000 people and a model government-sponsored healthcare and education system for 10,000 of the poorest women and children.” Ninety-three percent of Mali’s urban population lives in slums;residents face crippling poverty and little or no access to water, sanitation, healthcare, or education.
Cohen co-founded the Mali Health Organizing Project (MHOP) in 2005 with fellow Brown students Lindsay Ryan ’06 and Erica Trauba ’07. With funding from a Royce Fellowship, she had journeyed to Mali to conduct AIDS vaccine research. But the plight of the people she met in densely populated slums turned her away from research and toward action. Taking a leave of absence from Brown, she lived and worked for a year in Sikaroni, a community of 60,000 people, and began shepherding her dream of a government/citizens cooperative healthcare initiative to fruition.
Now headquartered in Sikoro, Mali, MHOP brings government officials and citizens together to address topics such as sanitation, malaria, diarrhea, and primary health care. Atpresent the project serves more than 8,300 people with healthcare andeducation through locally-designed initiatives. Its slogan is “Promoting Health Change, Not Charity.”
“One in four children in Mali dies before age five,” Cohen says. ”I didn’t understand what that statistic meant, how enormous a toll this takes, until I worked the overnight shift in a maternity ward.
“I helped a woman deliver her baby, and the child was born dead. Living in the slum, I realized that the root cause of many health problems in Mali is the deadlock between slum residents and their government. MHOP enables communities to design their own sustainable healthcare systems with their government’s investment.”
Other Brunonians with connections to MHOP are board member Christopher Bull, senior research engineer in the Division of Engineering; and adviser Anani Dzidzienyo, professor of Africana studies. The organization also partners with Brown’s Swearer Center for Public Service and the PLME Senate.
In this year of high-profile elections, Cohen has been eager to get out the vote for MHOP. “I hope people find our mission of promoting sustainable health change compelling,” she says.