“You can’t do hard things alone,” said Sriram Shamasunder, Professor of Medicine at UCSF and Co-Founder and Faculty Director of the HEAL Initiative, emphasizing the importance of connection and community. Speaking at the 2025 Human Rights and Humanitarian Forum, co-hosted by the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative and The Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law, Professor Shamasunder underscored the need for support systems and professional pathways that allow frontline health workers to thrive.
Held on May 7, 2025, at UCLA under the theme “At the Crossroads: Driving Integrated Action for a Resilient Future,” the Forum featured the session “Health and Human Rights: Grassroots Approaches for Lasting Impact,” which explored how community-led strategies are reshaping public health outcomes around the world, particularly in underserved and crisis-affected regions.
Nidhi Bouri, Former Deputy Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID, underscored that abrupt cuts in international funding have devastated global health programs, leading to operational chaos and lasting harm to both implementing organizations and the communities they serve. “We have seen, across every area of health, pretty significant immediate impacts with terminations on the ability of children to get routine immunizations, the ability of mothers to deliver babies safely, the ability of distributing products like bed nets that we know are critical and an easy way to prevent the transmission of malaria, and so on and so forth,” said Ms. Bouri. “And the challenge that I think the community broadly has now is: What is a way to move forward when you have a bunch of pieces without an ability to bring them back together?”
Geetha Tharmaratnam, Chief Impact Investment Officer at the WHO Foundation, also noted the global ripple effects of shrinking development funding and explained how her foundation is working to mobilize greater private sector support, seeing this shift as a chance to rethink and strengthen funding models. “The despair is plentiful, and it is painful—especially for those of us, and those of you, who have done a tremendous amount of work to try and make a difference over a very long period of time. And as we think about where the opportunity is, the first is around agency and what it means for our countries around the world to choose how they want to take forward the development agenda going forward,” said Ms. Tharmaratnam. “As you think about rebuilding with a different focus, the first question is: What is urgent and immediate now, and what is investment that is needed over a longer period of time?”
Moderator Alice Park, Senior Health Correspondent at TIME, discussed with Ms. Tharmaratnam the need for better data and storytelling to help investors recognize healthcare as a stable, long-term investment opportunity, even if returns take more time to materialize. “There’s probably some pretty strong data that can go behind that investment to show that there is a pretty large percentage chance that you will see a good result—you will see a reduction in maternal mortality or child mortality. But that often isn’t conveyed, because the time period to get to that point that, you know, often some people feel is too long, too far on the horizon,” noted Ms. Park.
In discussing other challenges faced by health workers, Professor Shamasunder stressed out that while funding is essential, factors like mastery, autonomy, and connection to others are equally critical for retention, especially in rural areas. “One of the things contributing to burnout, for a lot of folks, is what Paul Farmer has called “stupid deaths”: when you’re working in these contexts, you see needless suffering. You see a level of patients dying from things that we know how to treat, that we have access to those medicines in different parts of the world, but they’re still dying,” explained Professor Shamasunder. “[There is] this concept of ‘moral injury’ where health workers are seeing this needless suffering and they’re wanting to change the system. And you have to do that in community, in connection, and not be isolated.”
Reflecting on the challenges of truly community-led work, Alina Dorian, Associate Dean for Public Health Practice and Associate Professor in the Community Health Sciences Department at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, emphasized that it requires humility, a shift in power, and long-term commitment—something traditional academic and funding structures often struggle to support. “Community-led work is all about relationships. It’s all about trust. Those are things that move at the speed of building a relationship, building trust—not outcomes and deliverables,” stated Associate Dean Dorian. “So, in an academic institution, there are additional things we need to think about. We could be amazing partners because of the skill, the training, the expertise—the things we can bring. But we also need to think about our own systems—and whether they truly understand and value community-based work.”