Paul Farmer is the author of To Repair the World: Paul Farmer Speaks to the Next Generation (2013) and Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (2003), as well as being the subject of Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (2003). He recently spoke with Dean Nelson, founder of the Writer's Symposium by the Sea at Point Loma Nazarene University at UC San Diego (UCTV).

Here is a little bit from Wikipedia:

Paul Edward Farmer (born October 26, 1959) is an American anthropologist and physician who is best known for his humanitarian work providing "first world" health care for "third world" people, beginning in Haiti. Co-founder of international social justice and health organization Partners In Health (PIH), he is "the man who would cure the world" as made famous in the award-winning Mountains Beyond Mountains by Pulitzer-prize-winning author Tracy Kidder.

The world needs more people like Farmer.

Repairing the World: A Conversation with Paul Farmer 

Published on Apr 28, 2014


Known as "the man who would cure the world," Paul Farmer works to provide first world health care for third world peoples and co-founded the worldwide organization Partners in Health. Author of To Repair the World: Paul Farmer Speaks to the Next Generation (2013) and Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (2003), Farmer was also the subject of Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (2003). Dr. Farmer talks here with Dean Nelson, founder of the Writer's Symposium by the Sea at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Recorded on 04/09/2014. [5/2014] - (Visit: http://www.uctv.tv)

Utah Provides Free Apartments for the Homeless - Can End Homelessness by 2015

Brilliant and compassionate. Homeless people get a free home and a social worker to help them become self-sufficient. Even if they fail to become self-sufficient, they keep the apartment. Utah. Who would have thought.

Utah Is Ending Homelessness by Giving People Homes

Earlier this month, Hawaii State representative Tom Bower (D) began walking the streets of his Waikiki district with a sledgehammer, and smashing shopping carts used by homeless people. “Disgusted” by the city’s chronic homelessness problem, Bower decided to take matters into his own hands — literally. He also took to rousing homeless people if he saw them sleeping at bus stops during the day.

 

Bower’s tactics were over the top, and so unpopular that he quickly declared “Mission accomplished,” and retired his sledgehammer. But Bower’s frustration with his city’s homelessness problem is just an extreme example of the frustration that has led cities to pass measures that effective deal with the homeless by criminalizing homelessness.

• City council members in Columbia, South Carolina, concerned that the city was becoming a “magnet for homeless people,” passed an ordinance giving the homeless the option to either relocate or get arrested. The council later rescinded the ordinance, after backlash from police officers, city workers, and advocates.
• Last year, Tampa, Florida — which had the most homeless people for a mid-sized city — passed an ordinance allowing police officers to arrest anyone they saw sleeping in public, or “storing personal property in public.” The city followed up with a ban on panhandling downtown, and other locations around the city.
• Philadelphia took a somewhat different approach, with a law banning the feeding of homeless people on city parkland. Religious groups objected to the ban, and announced that they would not obey it.
• Raleigh, North Carolina took the step of asking religious groups to stop their longstanding practice of feeding the homeless in a downtown park on weekends. Religious leaders announced that they would risk arrest rather than stop.

This trend makes Utah’s accomplishment even more noteworthy. In eight years, Utah has quietly reduced homelessness by 78 percent, and is on track to end homelessness by 2015.

How did Utah accomplish this? Simple. Utah solved homelessness by giving people homes. In 2005, Utah figured out that the annual cost of E.R. visits and jail says for homeless people was about $16,670 per person, compared to $11,000 to provide each homeless person with an apartment and a social worker. So, the state began giving away apartments, with no strings attached. Each participant in Utah’s Housing First program also gets a caseworker to help them become self-sufficient, but the keep the apartment even if they fail. The program has been so successful that other states are hoping to achieve similar results with programs modeled on Utah’s.

It sounds like Utah borrowed a page from Homes Not Handcuffs, the 2009 report by The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty and The National Coalition for the Homeless. Using a 2004 survey and anecdotal evidence from activists, the report concluded that permanent housing for the homeless is cheaper than criminalization. Housing is not only more human, it’s economical.

This happened in a Republican state! Republicans in Congress would probably have required the homeless to take a drug test before getting an apartment, denied apartments to homeless people with criminal records, and evicted those who failed to become self-sufficient after five years or so. But Utah’s results show that even conservative states can solve problems like homelessness with decidedly progressive solutions.

TED - It’s World Peace Day! What will you do this Sept. 21?

From the good folks at TED Talks.

It’s World Peace Day! What will you do this Sept. 21?

September 21, 2011, is World Peace Day — dreamed up by Jeremy Gilley, as he explains above, as a day when combatants take a day off. It seems a simple, crazy idea, but on this past World Peace Day, in regions of Afghanistan, more than a million children were able to be immunized during the lull in fighting.

Today, Gilley is kicking off a yearlong runup to Global Truce 2012 — “a day of ceasefire and nonviolence observed by all sectors of society globally.” Not just countries at war, but neighborhoods, communities. Sign up to show your support.

Introduction – Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy

This essay serves as the Introduction to Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, edited by Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown, Cambridge University Press (2008). The book was just released in paperback in May (2011).

Introduction – Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy

Richard Ashby Wilson
University of Connecticut School of Law


Richard D. Brown
affiliation not provided to SSRN

HUMANITARIANISM AND SUFFERING: THE MOBILIZATION OF EMPATHY, Richard Ashby Wilson, Richard D. Brown, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2008


Abstract:
Humanitarian sentiments have motivated a variety of manifestations of pity, from nineteenth-century movements to end slavery to the creation of modern international humanitarian law. While humanitarianism is clearly political, Humanitarianism and Suffering addresses the ways in which it is also an ethos embedded in civil society, one that drives secular and religious social and cultural movements, not just legal and political institutions. As an ethos, humanitarianism has a strong narrative and representational dimension that can generate humanitarian constituencies for particular causes. The emotional nature of compassion is closely linked to visual and literary images of suffering and innocence. Essays in the volume seek to understand the character, form and voice of private or public narratives themselves and to explain how and why some narratives of suffering become part of political movements of solidarity, whereas others do not. Humanitarianism and Suffering is concerned with identifying when, how and why humanitarian movements become widespread popular movements, how popular sentiments move political and social elites to action and conversely, how national elites attempt to appropriate humanitarian ideals for more instrumental ends.

Citation:

Wilson, Richard Ashby and Brown, Richard D., Introduction – Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (May 24, 2008). HUMANITARIANISM AND SUFFERING: THE MOBILIZATION OF EMPATHY, Richard Ashby Wilson, Richard D. Brown, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2008. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1851965