Equity
At our core, Common Hope for Health's mission is a moral one. In an era of unprecedented wealth, opportunity, and advancement, billions of people around the world continue to struggle against history's most timeless perils: poverty, powerlessness, bodily suffering, early death. CHH believes that this state of affairs—profound affluence juxtaposed against profound privation—is morally unjust. CHH seeks to serve, in a spirit of rectifying a wrong rather than of dispensing charity, these many who toil under the burdens of massive social inequality. Justice is merely love structured into society, and the root of our work, therefore, is love.
Excellence
It is not enough merely to want to do good; good intentions, if untethered and unguarded, can lead to ineffectualness, waste, and most egregiously, harm. Common Hope for Health therefore believes that the pursuit of social justice must be coupled with a relentless pursuit of excellence—a commitment not only to doing good, but to doing it very well. This commitment manifests in CHH's work in several ways:
We adopt an evidence-based approach to global health delivery. By drawing on the experiences of other organizations, we identify and deliver strategies and interventions that are able to demonstrate the greatest success in improving the health of poor and vulnerable communities.
We innovate and learn. By continuously monitoring and evaluating our own experiences, we improve upon existing approaches as well as identify novel approaches to global health delivery. Ultimately, we remain committed to human beings rather than to new ideas or new technologies; if given a choice between an old intervention with proven benefit and a new, exciting technology with little potential for real impact, we will choose the former. That said, learning, innovation, and improvement are fundamental to how we evaluate our performance: if we are not improving, we are failing.
We share what we learn. CHH seeks to build a global network of organizations that are involved in practical, community-based efforts to improve global health. In particular, as a student-run organization, we are committed to bringing together other students and young people who are boldly and often painstakingly working with local communities in low-resource settings to deliver health services. CHH believes that we can all be more effective global health implementers if we work in collaboration and partnership rather than in isolation.
As a public charity, CHH strives for the highest degree of integrity and transparency in its stewardship of financial resources. CHH is a volunteer-run organization, and CHH officers personally underwrite 100% of the organization's administrative costs. As such, 100% of external gifts and contributions are used to support programs and services that directly assist disadvantaged communities.
Empowerment
Common Hope for Health believes that efforts to improve global health are most effective when two conditions are met: (1) individuals and communities in need are centrally involved as agents of change, and (2) diverse stakeholders work in partnership toward common goals.
To advance these two conditions, CHH forges long-term partnerships with grassroots, community-driven health initiatives in low-resource settings. Communities and community groups invariably have the requisite local expertise, social capital, and moral commitment to manage dynamic grassroots health initiatives effectively. What they often lack, however, are the technical and financial resources needed to propel these initiatives forward. CHH fills this gap by providing assistance in areas such as strategic planning, financial management, human resource management, monitoring and evaluation, and clinical guidelines. At all times, our focus is on empowering rather than supplanting our partners: In what ways can Common Hope for Health act so that its existence eventually becomes wholly dispensable?
