On February 10, members from over 40 organizations gathered at the Sewa Community Center in Milpitas for Sewa Bay Area’s first Bill of Responsibilities Summit (BoRS). The event united elected government officials, academics, non-profit organizations, the media and the private sector, to foster discussions about the Bay Area community’s most pressing needs.
Sewa Bay Area leadership including President Dr. Anurag Mairal, VP Government Relations Rakhi Israni and Program Director Sudha Prabhunandan moderated the panel discussions.
A Model for Collaboration
Keynote speaker Dr. Catherine Mohr took the stage to talk about her experiences founding the Intuitive Foundation, an organization that promotes medical education and works to increase medical training capacity to alleviate the burden of disease globally.
Describing the genesis of the Intuitive Foundation, she shared her experiences studying the healthcare industries in low- and middle-income countries like Nigeria and India. She observed their medical education and practice, and identified a significant shortage of trained medical personnel – especially surgeons – in these communities.
Dr. Mohr established the Intuitive Foundation to address this shortage; her foundation works with local organizations around the world to develop resource-effective interventions to train more medical professionals.
One innovative outcome she described featured a research group in Ethiopia that developed a new way to provide laparoscopic surgical training using just a smartphone and a specially designed cardboard box. Not only does this enable students to practice on their own, but they can upload their videos online to get feedback from peers based on a predetermined checklist of criteria.
“We have an enormous amount of evidence that shows that novices with a checklist are as good at giving feedback as the master surgeon educator,” said Dr. Mohr. “A platform like this takes it from the learners being a burden on the system, to the learners being part of the solution.”
She urged organizations in the room to form partnerships and build a community of practice to make communities more resilient. “The thing about partnership is, it’s kind of like a workout partner that gets you into the gym, even on the days when you don’t want to go to the gym,” she said. “They show up for you when you need them, and you need to show up for them when they need you.”
Insights on food insecurity and education
The first panel discussion of the morning titled “From Scarcity to Sufficiency: Building a Stronger Future” focused on the connections between education and food insecurity. Speakers included Larry Sweeney, School Board Trustee for the Fremont Unified School District; Chris Norwood, School Board Trustee from the Milpitas Unified School District; Larry Klein, Mayor of Sunnyvale; Todd Langton, Founder of the non-profit Agape; and Chris Sturken, Partnership Manager for Sacred Heart Community and Council Member for Redwood City. Sudha Prabhunandan, Director of Sewa’s after-school program ASPIRE acted as moderator.
“Hunger and education inequity is inextricably linked to racial injustice,” said Chris Sturken. “We systematically starved entire communities and we have to come together to address it.” Sturken works with Sacred Heart Community, an organization that delivers basic needs like food and clothing to underserved communities, and leads urban gardening initiatives to increase their nutritional self-sufficiency.
Todd Langton at Agape Silicon Valley also works with unhoused communities. Elected officials and the community should prioritize food security for the unhoused, he said, appealing for support to organizations working with the Bay Area’s unhoused communities. “The unhoused will make better decisions if they have a full stomach, warm clothes and a roof.”
Larry Sweeney and Chris Norwood, who represent two high-performing, Bay Area public school districts, stressed the importance of data-driven decision-making, and community participation in building a robust educational infrastructure. They added that the state’s new policy of analyzing school-level data to identify gaps and create a Local Control Accountability Plan gives communities the chance to provide input on what their schools need. “That will tell you what they are mapping out for the future, for the school district to improve based on what the state requirements are,” said Norwood.
Addressing mental health and wellbeing
Rakhi Israni moderated the final discussion of the day titled “Building Resilience: Shelter, Health, and Disaster Preparedness – Navigating Challenges, Transforming Lives.” The panel featured Dr. Harsha Ramchandani, Chief Medical Officer of the Bay Area Community Health (BACH); Anil Surpur, President of Yoga Bharati; Franci Collins, Community Relations Liaison of Collaborating Agencies’ Disaster Relief Effort (CADRE); Cindy Chavez, Supervisor of Santa Clara County; and Alex Lee, California State Assemblymember.
Dr. Ramchandani emphasized the importance of addressing the social determinants of health like poverty, access to nutritious food, exercise, and mental and emotional support from one’s family and community. Her organization Bay Area Community Health (BACH) provides affordable and easily accessible healthcare to over 66,000 patients. Mental health problems are rising, she added, and more people are experiencing depression and anxiety in the wake of layoffs.
“We all can agree that the behavioral health access is very, very limited,” said Dr. Ramachandran, referring to the long wait times for mental health care. “We need more advocacy… and make sure that the healthcare system is invested in bringing in the health care providers who can offer such services.”
Anil Surpur suggested a wider uptake of alternative medicine interventions like yoga, to prevent and treat mental and physical health problems, based on research on yoga and mental health undertaken by his organization Yoga Bharati. “We can apply it as practice once we have a protocol in place.”
The approaching climate change disaster
Franci Collins of CADRE pointed out that climate change – a “slow, rolling disaster” – will disproportionately impact underserved communities. “As the air gets worse, as wildfires get worse, as climate change plays out through heat events and cold events, the people without air conditioning, or heating, or good housing or any housing at all are going to suffer first,” she said.
She expressed disappointment at federal, state, and local budgets slashing funds for these services. “I just don’t see the preparations being made and the infrastructure being created that’s going to serve the populations in the future,” said Collins.
Assemblyman Alex Lee offered some sobering statistics to back Collins: “There are about 30% of Californians who live in poverty or under poverty. And yet in our state budget today, we only spent 12.5% on things like CalFresh which gives people food, CalWorks, which helps people save lives, or the foster care system.”
The only solution is for the state government to create a synergy between all levels of government, said Lee, and to listen to input from local communities to improve the delivery of essential services.
Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez summed up the spirit of the event aptly when she said, “If we want the world to be a better place, we have to treat it as a justice exercise, and then frankly, stop ourselves, really stop ourselves from waiting and kicking the can down. Which means that those of us who want to change the world have to be much more intellectually honest with each other.”
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