Alumnus Honored for Work Begun in Peace Corps.
Kevin Fiori (’03) and his wife, Jenny Schechter, will receive the 2016 Sargent Shriver Award for Distinguished Humanitarian Service at the annual Peace Corps Connect conference on September 24.
The National Peace Corps Association gives the Sargent Shriver Award annually to former Peace Corps volunteers for their continued work for humanitarian causes at home or abroad.
“On some level it’s just not right that there are individuals named in the award,” Fiori says. “I wish the award just said, ‘Hope Through Health/Association Espoir pour Demain.’”
Association Espoir pour Demain-Lidaw (AED) is an association of HIV-positive people living in northern Togo, founded by community members in 2001 to provide services for people living with HIV.
Thanks to the support of Hope Through Health, an organization founded and led by Fiori and Schechter to fund AED, the two organizations now provide HIV-related, maternal and child, and other healthcare for 30,000 people.
In 2003, Fiori came to Togo and AED as a student in the Master’s International Program at SPH, combining the master’s in public health with 27 months of field experience with the Peace Corps. “I don’t think there’s any way to really prepare for Peace Corps service,” he says, but credits Joe Anzalone, senior manager of the global health department, for providing a “support group” of current and past participants to give perspective.
During his Peace Corps assignment, Fiori saw AED start to grow. Before he arrived, AED had secured a US Department of Defense Fund grant through the American ambassador to build its main clinic. In 2004, Schechter joined AED as another Peace Corps volunteer and established the first of four satellite clinics. Meanwhile, antiretroviral therapy (ART) was slowly becoming more available in the country, and on the horizon was the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis just beginning to support efforts throughout Africa.
Fiori and Schechter helped look for funding that could support AED until the Global Fund came to northern Togo, but no foundation was willing to invest in such a new, small organization in a small and often overlooked West African country.
So the couple founded their own.
Hope Through Health turned out to do far more than just sustain AED for a couple of years. The partnership led to more clinics, more patients, and—as access to ART improved—a fundamental change in the lives of people living with HIV in northern Togo. HIV became a manageable, chronic condition, and soon Hope Through Health and AED were successfully preventing transmission from mothers to babies.
“Now we had a generation of kids who were HIV negative, so they weren’t directly benefiting from our services,” Fiori says. “It came again from the community: we should be getting away from vertical programming and looking more towards universal healthcare access.”
Hope Through Health and AED continued to provide care to HIV-positive people—by HIV-positive community health workers—but, after joining the Clinton Global Initiative in 2015, also added maternal and child health efforts.
Working with the Togolese Ministry of Health, Hope Through Health and AED integrated into the public sector as a community health delivery model. They launched a partnership for HIV care in 2006, and for maternal and child health in 2015.
Fiori now directs the global health program at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, where he says he tries to pass that on to residents about to spend time abroad. “Change comes from folks on the ground and forging long-term partnerships,” he tells them.
As for receiving the Sargent Shriver Award with his wife, “we’re both looking at the award as a recognition of the partnership that we were able to play a part in establishing,” Fiori says. “It’s as much an award for my Togolese friends.”