Dr. Bill Foege played a key role in doing a thing that has been accomplished only once in the world.
He helped kill a disease, smallpox, in the 1960s and 1970s.
You would think that a guy who had the energy, tenacity, faith and vision to believe that thousands of people and multiple nations could work together to end a disfiguring and murderous disease — it infected about 50 million people yearly in the early 1950s and killed about 30 percent of those it touched — could, during a coffee break or two, knock off a program to get metro Atlanta’s multiple nonprofits to cooperate closely.
So much was at stake. Lives? Yes. But also those things Atlanta loves more than anything. Jobs and prestige. Innovation and a place at the world’s table, not just the nation’s.
But it hasn’t happened.
Why?
“I don’t know,” he told me last Monday at a lunch honoring him and celebrating the 30th anniversary of a global nonprofit that has his fingerprints all over it, the Decatur-based Task Force for Global Health. Its dedicated staff will deliver $3 billion (yes, with a “B”) worth of medical care and donated medicines around the globe next year.
A new group of people, with Foege’s support, is giving the cooperative organization another try. We should see some indications of how it’s going to go by the end of the year.
Foege first envisioned the idea, now called the Global Health Alliance, in about 1999. He lived in Atlanta many years, working for, then heading up, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and The Carter Center. He believes metro and Georgia businesses and organizations involved internationally in health — disease treatment and eradication, public health and medical research, vaccinations and bioscience — ought to coordinate, to talk to each other, to help out each other and work together. There is so much good that could be magnified, so much synergy and focus that could be brought to the humane and distinguishing work already done here.
Georgia has been on the map for years as a center for international medical help thanks to organizations like those Foege worked for, as well as CARE, MAP International, Morehouse and Emory University’s medical schools, the University of Georgia and MedShare. Their kind of work is shared by more than 100 large and small businesses and nonprofits.
Foege wanted Atlanta to become the global health capital. But two pushes failed to bring it into being.
Maybe the last effort to get all those organizations working together failed because of the Great Recession, says Maria Thacker-Goethe, the CEO of the new effort to get everyone to the table.
Some other inklings of potential disruptions among such organizations came to light during Monday’s luncheon, when Foege swapped stories, advice and memories with Dr. Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank; Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health whose work in Haiti and Africa has distinguished him; and Dr. Mark Rosenberg, the head of the Task Force for Global Health. They talked about killing smallpox and implementing worldwide child vaccination programs, going after malaria and parasitic diseases that have blinded and crippled for centuries, and lifting tens of millions out of abject poverty into better lives.
Now, those are some bragging rights.
But behind some of the stories were memories and warnings of ego and competition. There were and are disagreements about methodology and money, and there is fear of failure between organizations and countries and men. There is distrust.
Foege knows the cure for that too.
“Trust is the glue of a coalition that will actually work,” he told the crowd of several hundred people.
That worked in Washington state, which beat Atlanta to the punch on establishing itself as a global health capital. Foege moved there to work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for several years. Washington picked up Georgia’s fumble and built, with Foege’s support, the Washington Global Health Alliance. It brags of 168 organizations working in more than 150 countries, with an economic impact on the state of $5.8 billion.
That’s a lot of lives changed and goodwill generated.
Georgia leaders have turned to Washington to learn how to do what this state could have done years ago. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation gave a $348,000 grant to Washington so its organization could teach Georgia how to bring it all together.
Some Georgia heavyweights, such as Atlanta-born Dr. Louis Sullivan, a Morehouse man and former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, are meeting behind the scenes individually with the many organization chiefs who have a stake in this. They have been listening and building consensus since June.
Rosenberg from the Task Force for Global Health, says it’s hard to build a successful coalition. It’s a lot like a marriage. It’s easy to get into it, but it’s hard work to make it work.
The effort this time includes a broadened vision of including health IT, pharmaceutical and other for-profit companies. The organizing team is doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work to ask all the organizations, how could this cooperative effort help you? Rosenberg said.
Rosenberg is optimistic, optimism being something hard to come by when you are trying to eliminate diseases and you look at the facts stacked against you.
“I have no question it is going to take off,” he said. “It’s going to help (the region) to do good and do well at the same time.”
The Global Health Alliance hopes to present a draft of a strategic framework to its steering committee in December.
The state and the world will be watching.
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