Accompanying the underserved
If there’s one thing that graduating Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) students have learned, it’s how to develop good policy. But before heading into government, consulting, and nonprofit work, they received one last lesson from renowned physician and humanitarian Paul Farmer. What graduates must now learn, Farmer said Wednesday (May 25), is how to work with communities on the ground to solve systemic problems. It’s a process that Farmer, Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard and co-founder of Partners In Health, calls “accompaniment,” being “present with someone on a journey with a beginning and an end,” no matter how long that journey might take. “The road from policy development to implementation is usually long and rocky, one that must be trod with companions,” Farmer said in his Commencement address at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. Drawing on areas ranging from liberation theology to his own experiences with Partners...