Brady Fox - Mount Pleasant Kep Health Initiative
Brady Fox was the founder of Rotaract in Nanaimo 2007/08 with their main project sponsoring refugees from South Sudan.
Brady is a student at UBC obtaining his Masters in Public Policy, specializing in International Aid and Investment.
He is currently working with The Mount Pleasant Kep Health Initiative volunteering in Cambodia.
More information about his organization:
The Mount Pleasant Kep Health Initiative was started in February, 2014 with the goals of improving health infrastructure capacity in rural Cambodia while facilitating service learning opportunities for young Canadians. We accomplish this through funding health infrastructure projects in the province of Kep, Cambodia and providing short-term training and volunteer placements for Canadian students as part of those projects. The projects that we fund in Cambodia are locally driven and locally-managed in order to ensure that they are desired, effective and sustainable.
Our projects take the form of 4 to 6 week placements for students as part of a group of 11 other peers in the province of Kep, Cambodia, where they partake in a holistic mix of volunteer work, individual study, and knowledge transfer with local partner organizations. Our participants stay directly in the village where we work. As such, we put a strong emphasis on providing training for our volunteers before their placement in order to both optimize the experiential learning process and to ensure that our impact on the host community is positive and respectful. Training is facilitated through seminars that take place in Canada prior to travel, as well as in the field with our partner stakeholders. Our partners include Equitable Cambodia, the Cambodian National Institute for Public Health and the Kep Provincial Health department.
MKHI recruits, vets and trains the volunteers that take part in our projects. We organize all the logistics for the projects, including food, accommodation, and transportation. We decide upon the health infrastructure projects we fund in coordination with our local partner, Equitable Cambodia. The content of our coursework has been developed internally, drawing on a mix of contemporary discourse on global health and development, service learning models, and the unique experience of operating in Cambodia, specifically. Our course themes are: an introduction to global health studies, with Cambodia as a case study; contextualizing modern Cambodia both historically and politically; engaging with problems and challenges in global volunteerism and international aid, and self-reflection within the context of international power dynamics.