Meeting Recap for Monday, April 28, 2014
You grow up in bucolic Gilroy, get yourself an undergraduate degree in biology from Harvard, move on to get your M.D. from Vanderbilt and then do your pediatric internship at UC San Francisco while starting an international nonprofit or two in your spare time.
And then you settle down for a well-deserved and rewarding medical career in…the Congo?! Somewhere along the way, Dr. Joshua Bress either failed to get the email about how “the good life” works, or he disregarded it.
Instead of opting for a posh practice on the Peninsula, Pacific Heights or even Granite Bay, Rotary Club of Sacramento’s guest speaker Monday set up shop in Liberia, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo and India.
Why? In Sub-Saharan Africa one in five Congolese children don’t survive to the age of five and the neonatal mortality rate is also among the highest in the world: about one out of 40 babies die at the age of one (day).
Introduced by Chair of the Day Roy Alexander, Dr. Bress is president of an international health care nonprofit called Global Strategies that he helped to found. It’s headquartered in Albany, California, but it delivers service in some of the world’s more dangerous locales.
“Our mission is to empower communities in the most neglected parts of the world to improve the lives of women and children,” said Bress. “Sub-Saharan Africa has about 24% of the world’s burden of disease but only about three percent of the world’s health care workers and one percent of its financial resources.”
Bress credits Global Strategies’ success in achieving results and minimizing physical danger to its philosophy of working through “respected local groups” to deliver care, rather than coming into a foreign land and setting up its own operation.
“We work to address immediate needs (crises),” he said, “then we begin to work on prevention. It isn’t hard to figure out what the problems are or how to fix them. It isn’t a mystery why so many babies and young children die: birth asphyxia, infectious diseases and prematurity.”
Global Strategies trains its local partners not only to deal with those problems, but also to train additional local individual to deliver service—thus expanding the networks of care capable of delivering respiratory therapy, neonatal care and so on.
Bress had kind words to say about Rotary International’s work to eliminate polio: “You’ve done wonderful work. In my year in the Congo, we did not see a single case of polio. So that’s close to having been eradicated. Let’s make babies our next big success.”
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Dan McVeigh was introduced as our club’s newest Rotary Sacramento Fellow by Past-President Peter Dannenfelser II. An attorney at Downey Brand, McVeigh is a 16-year member of our club, a three-time Eddie Mulligan Fellow and two-time Paul Harris Fellow. He has served on the club’s board of directors and numerous committees. He also has been very active in the community, serving on a variety of nonprofit boards including Stanford Home and the YMCA.
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Attorney Ilene Block was inducted by President Thom Gilbert as the newest member of RCS. Block was sponsored for membership by John Wood and her law partner Rex Berry.
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President Thom pointed out recent advertising and publicity highlighting the club and our upcoming centennial celebration. Sacramento Magazine’s current issue contains a large display ad and Comstock’s a feature story. There was also a “surprise visit” by Ellen Degeneris (who looked strangely like Chris Ann Bachtel) to promote the May 17 dinner at the Aerospace Museum.
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Tanya Kravchuk provided a brief tutorial on how to use Facebook—with President Thom giving attendees a rare “free pass” to turn on their smart phones and follow the instructions.
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Rev. Faith Whitmore, senior pastor at St. Mark’s United Methodist Church (and in her spare time, district aide to Congressman Ami Bera), delivered the invocation. She was introduced by Leo McFarland.
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Brian King from Los Rios Community College District and Shirley Tully from Sacramento Region Community Foundation acted as greeters. Paul Stone provided piano music during the pre-meeting wine reception, which was sponsored by Dave Higdon.
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IMPORTANT REMINDER: Next Monday’s meeting will be at the Hilton, not the Red Lion. The speaker will be Jim Pelley from LaughterWorks. No stranger to the RCS podium, Pelley is past-president of the Historic Folsom Rotary Club.