Paul Farmer

One of the people I met was Paul English at the time.

And he said, hey, there's this group associated with the Brigham and with Partners in Health, Paul Farmer, Jim Kim, And they're trying to bring a bunch of folks together from the startup community to help global health.

And so I thought, okay, this is super interesting.

And so that's how I got introduced to the global health delivery team.

I read a book called called Mountains Beyond Mountains.

And this was a book about Paul Farmer.

He was an infectious disease doctor, actually, who specialized in global health, specifically around tuberculosis.

And that's what I wanted to do.

And so that was kind of the really amazing opportunity, but then.

I think we together, you know, Michael Murphy had this opportunity through his relationship with Paul Farmer and going to hear him speak at Harvard.

And, you know, Paul Farmer, after Michael had spent a summer there, said, we have a hospital we need to build.

Can you all come and help? And that's when Michael kind of gathered, you know, around him, you know, students that were interested in assisting and went there and did the work for around a year and I think we came and actually in the beginning, it was myself and Maura Rockcastle who were both working together.

We started work there because they realized Paul Farmer had this deep understanding of landscape as a thing that brings dignity to place.

And so he always starts first with like building gardens and creating public spaces that are really beautiful, no matter where he's working.

And so Michael and Alan and others were like, we think we might need some landscape architects right away, which is great because they were, you know, citing buildings and doing lots of other things besides, you know, adding, you know, beautiful gardens.

So it's interesting to me that the early work, the early projects of mass that became quite canonical over time in Africa and sub-Saharan Africa have their origin in the South.

I was like...

Totally obsessed with Paul Farmer and medical anthropology and tech was not on the radar for sure.

Yeah, yeah.

So how did you, did you find any challenges to sort of picking up that, you know, piece of the industry that was far different from medicine?

It reminded me of one of my favorite books, which deals with this subject.

in a more historical and cultural point of view, Paul Farmer's Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds on the Ebola Outbreak in 2014.

It is a truly amazing book and explains how the human institutional interaction with infectious disease outbreaks is as important as the science, all the same as science.

you know, that TB book that I referred to, where he calls TB, you know, basically not an infectious disease, a human disease, that humans

Yeah, sure.

So It was a group that was started out of a group of students who met Paul Farmer, who was the head and kind of founder of Partners in Health, which is an amazing nonprofit healthcare delivery organization that really is not like Doctors Without Borders, who serve a very important need in post-conflict situations.

Paul Farmer's thought about this is that in order to have lasting change and systemic impact over time, you have to embed in community and build those systems from the bottom up alongside those places.

And so when Partners in Health goes into a place, they stay forever.

And eventually that organization becomes a local organization.

So when they wanted to provide a new kind of service to destigmatize getting treatment for AIDS.

They started to build special spaces for that where people could go in and out of them without necessarily being identified by their communities and et cetera, and building housing for marginalized communities.

And so one of our founders, Michael Murphy, went and heard Paul Farmer speak and said, well, what architects are you working with? And it had not Paul Farmer's and no one's ever offered And so they were just kind of doing it on their own.