On April 5, 2013, the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health Student Global Health Committee and Student Government are hosting a Charity Gala in Chapel Hill that will benefit Impact Global Health Alliance Global.
The Student Global Health Committee and Student Government chose Impact Global Health Alliance Global as recipient of this year’s fundraiser because we are a small, local public health organization and most of our funding goes directly to the field, where the needs are. For 30 years we have partnered with local organizations and community leaders so the needs are first identified by the community, then we focus on sustainability through education and building capacity of our local partner to be health leaders in their communities.
At Impact Global Health Alliance we believe that to achieve sustainable improvements within communities it is essential to engage community members and leadership in every aspect of program development—from identifying priority health needs, to promoting and supporting health education and behavior change, to measuring improvements. Our Community-Based, Impact Oriented approach (CBIO) ensures that at each stage of the process community members and our partners are integrally involved. This resource-intensive process empowers communities, ensures that each person is accounted for, and creates ownership for interventions that guarantee lasting change and improvements in health.
Funding from large donors like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) create the opportunity to establish sound programs in-county. They also meet significant health needs like prenatal and postnatal care for mothers, disease treatment and prevention for young children, and equipping community and facility-based partners to recognize and address health emergencies in an appropriate and timely manner to save lives.
However these projects can only meet a portion of the needs identified by our communities. Grants from foundations such as Ronald McDonald House Charities® and the Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation help leverage program activities by fitting like puzzle pieces into our current partnerships and meeting additional health needs by providing safe and clean water or culturally-sensitive trainings on breastfeeding and spacing of pregnancy.
The generosity of private donations permits us to further leverage the funding that we have secured to adequately meet the needs of more than 100,000 people in the communities we serve throughout the year. Private donations help support many activities at Impact Global Health Alliance including: providing shipping and logistics costs to send vitamin donations to Guatemala; building and maintenance education of hand washing stations in Liberia; and providing transportation in Haiti so HIV positive beneficiaries receive care even in remote towns with no road access. We could not meet these crucial needs without help from our donors.
We are grateful to the UNC School of Public Health students for their dedicated efforts on behalf of these communities, and hope that we will have a strong turn out on April 5th in support of promoting Hope through Health in the communities that Impact Global Health Alliance serves.
