Graduation Address for Global Health Technologies Minor
Last Sunday, I went out for a long run, and as I usually do,
I tuned in to a podcast of This American Life. Last week’s episode was called The Incredible Rarity of Changing Your Mind, and it was about both what it takes to change
peoples’ minds and, more importantly, what it takes for people to change their
lives.
The first story focused on a new, grassroots advocacy
strategy to get people to change their minds about deeply held beliefs. They followed political canvassers as they
went door to door trying to change peoples’ minds about two subjects that are really
difficult to talk about – gay marriage and abortion. It turns out that people are much more likely
to change their mind if one simple thing happens - if they have a real
conversation about the issue with someone who is personally affected by it. The key to getting people to change their
minds was not for the canvasser to talk, but for the canvasser to listen, to
ask questions, to find out more, and see where it leads. When people talk about an issue in terms of
their own lives, it often leads them to different conclusions. When canvassers used this strategy, they found
that 15% of people changed their opinion about these very personal topics - and
most importantly maintained this change more than a year after the initial conversation.
The research was published recently as a case control study in Science – and
there’s one critical fact that is relevant to global health – voters only
changed their mind when they had the conversation with someone who was
personally affected by the issue.
In this time of growing need but shrinking aid for global
health, it made me wonder - how do people in Malawi and places like Malawi
manage to be part of these conversations? In this day of global connectivity,
it is still all too easy for the challenges of our global neighbors to remain
invisible. Too easy for us not to see
the overwhelming challenges that babies, girls, and moms face. Through your
coursework in the minor, you’ve learned the skills, developed personal tools to
begin to identify and solve some of these problems. Now it is time for YOU to put this knowledge
to use and become agents of change. Your generation is the one that must
address global health inequities and you have a big job ahead of you.
In the second story This American Life visited a program in
Richmond, California that is trying a controversial method to reduce gun
violence in their city: paying criminals not to commit crimes. It sounds crazy, but the even crazier part is
that it is working. The chief of police did
an analysis that showed that 70% of shootings in the city involved just 17
guys. He theorized that if he could get
those guys to change it would make a big dent in the city’s crime program, so he
invited them to a meeting. And offered to pay them to stay out of trouble. In
effect, changing their lives could become their job. And the former criminals
eventually got paying jobs and homicide rates in the city decreased by 67%.
Now at this point in my run, the endorphins were really kicking
in, and it got me thinking, maybe this should be the message for today’s
graduation. Not that I think you are criminals – but if we are asking you to be
Agents of Change – we need to give you tools to be Agents of Change. Some of those tools you developed in GLHT 201
and 360, some you developed late at night in the OEDK working on your senior
design project. And some of those tools
you developed working in Ethiopia or Malawi or Brazil. But you can’t be an Agent of Change without two
important things: a t-shirt and resources.
And so, Maria and I decided to invest some resources in you. We’ve given each of you a $100 gift card,
with a special request. We’re asking you
to use this money as an Agent of Change – in the next year to make an
investment to initiate change for something that you care about personally.
You might use it to buy books for grad school to get your MPH, you might use it
to fund part of your travel to a volunteer experience, you might give it to an NGO,
or use it to buy some supplies for the new design kitchen at Malawi Polytechnic
– whatever you want. All we ask is that you use the Rice 360 Facebook
page to tell all of us how you invested the money and what is the change you
hope to see from this investment.
We can’t wait to hear your stories from the next year. We can’t wait to hear your stories from the brilliant
careers we know you will all have. Remember
us when you come back to campus, have dinner with us when we visit your city. We
are so proud of you. Good luck and
congratulations!
