The Northwestern ATH Project is an interdisciplinary global community health initiative that brings law, public health and business faculty and graduate students together with communities and NGOs around the world.
The Northwestern ATH Project brings together faculty and graduate students from across Northwestern University and around the world to address critical global health challenges that cannot be resolved from a singular siloed perspective. ATH works across disciplines to create targeted, sustainable initiatives that address health-related in partner communities, and to teach students how to engage in interdisciplinary, transnational, socially impactful collaborations. ATH has worked with rural communities in the Mopti region of Mali to address female genital cutting, with urban communities in Nigeria on health rights, and with healthcare providers in the Dominican Republic to increase quality of patient service, among others. Students at Northwestern’s law,medical and business schools participate in ATH primarily through the interdisciplinary Health and Human Rights course. The students form multidisciplinary teams to act as ‘consultants’ to research and innovate a new approach to an issue at the intersection of health, human rights and development based on the feedback from community-based partners. Students from the class may apply to join an in situ health needs assessment, and to incorporate the information from this fieldwork into the final project for their team.
Most recently, ATH collaborated with a peacebuilding organization in Somalia to address climate-related security risks. The focus of our collaboration was an assessment of opportunities for community-based initiatives in Somalia at the intersection of climate change, peace and security. In light of the intensive impacts of climate change on the region and the history of civil conflict in Somalia, the NGO has advocated for recognition of the destabilizing role climate change plays in peace and security in the form of global policy advocacy at multiple multinational and international fora. As much of the organization’s work has centered around high level advocacy around climate change and its impact on peace and security, the goal of this collaboration was to translate this global policy advocacy into actionable community-based work in Somalia. The student-driven multidisciplinary assessments and recommendation are complete; the next step is for ATH is to collaborate with the organization to implement the recommendations that it chooses to carry forward.