Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007 - (Page 6)

ON CAMPUS open lecture. Stone’s visit was generously arranged by trustee member Joseph Perella ’64. Between meetings and the lecture, Stone paused to speak with our own Becky Straw. How did you start Soft Power Health? Back in January 2003, I was invited on a kayaking trip to the Nile in Uganda. When I got there, everything was great for the ﬁrst few days, and then two of the guys I was with got malaria, and I had to treat them. It made me look around at the larger problem of malaria in the local area. I met a woman who had started a nonproﬁt there called Soft Power Education, and said, “What do you know about the malaria problem here?” and she said, “I don’t know anything about it. We build schools and orphanages.” Is that how Soft Power Health originated? It wasn’t. She had her own organization, Soft Power Education. I was subsequently introduced to a woman who still works for me. She and I went through the local village and interviewed families in 50 different huts and asked them: What’s your experience with malaria? Did you have it all the time? Do you sleep under a mosquito net? How much of your resources do you spend per month on malaria? Would you be interested in learning more about it? Would you be interested in getting mosquito nets? Everyone was very interested. Nobody slept under mosquito nets. They spent the majority of their resources on malaria. This led me to think that they are interested. We could provide a service that could be a small intervention that would be very beneﬁcial to people and, in some incidences, lifesaving. It was very low impact. It didn’t involve anything high tech, and it seemed pretty easy to do. What does the name Soft Power mean? Originally the name came from a Harvard professor who came up with this concept of soft power and what soft power meant. It meant that in the future, the world was going to change in meaningful ways—not through military might, but through softer means such as education. That had really struck a chord with the woman from Soft Power Education, and initially she asked me, “Will you call it Soft Power Health?” I said, “Sure.” The more I learned about it, the more I thought that’s really what we do. Our interventions are “soft” in terms of education, prevention, and treatment, but nothing super high tech. ten minutes with JESSIE STONE An extreme kayaker, Jessie Stone paddled into a new adventure while surﬁng the Nile River in Uganda back in 2003. Confronted with a country where malaria prevalence neared 100 percent, the former doctor created Soft Power Health, a nonproﬁt organization designed to reduce malaria’s occurrence. The parasitic disease annually kills 70,000 to 110,000 people in Uganda, many of whom are pregnant women or children under ﬁve. Soft Power Health educates villagers about malaria, sells mosquito nets, collects data, and operates a medical clinic. During the summer, Stone teaches inner-city children to kayak as part of an outdoor adventure camp, called the Boys and Girls Harbor. The children escape New York City to paddle on the Hudson River, the Farmington River in Connecticut, and, for more experienced paddlers, the Rogue River in Oregon. 6 lehigh alumni bulletin An avowed whitewater addict, Stone pursues an ongoing quest for the perfect wave. For the past eight years, she has competed in freestyle and extreme kayak racing events. At Lehigh, Stone made a splash by meeting students for lunch, speaking to a science and policy class, and addressing an audience in an PHOTO BY DOUGLAS BENEDICT

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Table of Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Arts & Culture Sports Research Cover Story - Forward March Little Man Overcomes Huge Odds Lights, Camera...Antiques Linderman Renewed From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News

Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007

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