About us

CFHI strives to be the leader in virtual and place-based Global, Local, and Planetary Health Education Programs and Field Experiences- setting quality, ethical, and safety standards and promoting sustainable, locally-led, systems-based Local/Global Health interventions aimed at improving health and wellness worldwide.  CFHI endeavors to lead in areas of Global Health Education programs, research, and thought leadership in deep collaboration with our Global Team.

Value 1 – Health is a human right

• CFHI ascribes to the value that health is a Human Right.  We teach this concept in our programming and curriculum.
• CFHI features health systems efforts to address health disparities. We highlight health systems/countries/local innovations to achieve Health for All.
• CFHI partners with a variety of local leaders including vulnerable and marginalized populations, highlighting local initiatives to address health for the most vulnerable, even when there is ongoing oppression and suboptimal human rights.
• CFHI approaches program development and operations thoughtfully, honoring our entire CFHI team and taking care to build systems, operations and approaches that honor our lives within and outside of work. Health is a human right for all, including mental, emotional, and physical health for our team. 

Value 2 – Global Health is a foundational, interdisciplinary pursuit.

• CFHI provides standard-setting virtual and place-based Global and Local Health Education Programs and Field Experiences in 10 countries for  graduate and undergraduate students and post-graduate trainees. 
• CFHI portrays the scope of Global Health and Local/Global Health challenges, interventions, and stakeholders to provide a comprehensive understanding of Global Health including the complexities of determinants of health and inter-disciplinary collaboration necessary to address health disparities. 
• CFHI’s Global Health Education Programs highlight and are in alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
• CFHI Global Health Education Programs and Field Experiences aim to demonstrate how all disciplines come to bear on Global Health (from business majors who will be future CEOs to pre-medical students who will be future doctors) and provide programming that nurtures an understanding of Global Health for students and trainees from diverse disciplines and backgrounds.

Value 3 – Humility is required to advance Global Health.

• CFHI builds humility into our program components on all levels, including theoretical frameworks, outreach/marketing, program focus/themes, curricular content, operational structures, and leadership.  
• CFHI utilizes an Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) and Engagement approach to inform how we frame, discuss, and structure our activities.  Rather than focusing on deficits and areas of lack, we focus on the strengths, assets and richness found in resource-poor or marginalized settings.
• CFHI emphasizes humility as an essential value and mindset of our scholars, team, collaborators, and stakeholders who are often coming from a high income/HIC frame of reference or from one that is different than the communities where our programs take place.  Thus, CFHI encourages the directive of our tagline:  “Let the World Change You.” 

Value 4- We are connected in our humanity and share one planet

• Our best world is one that embraces diversity and inclusiveness, recognizes and seeks to dismantle structural and other inequality, emphasizes the connectedness of humanity, seeks peaceful resolution to conflict, embraces human rights, works toward a sustainable environmental footprint, and safeguards a basic standard of living and health for the entire planet.
• CFHI offers a portfolio of virtual/online programs to increase access to these educational opportunities for more participants, and simultaneously to reduce our organizational carbon footprint. CFHI is exploring carbon offsets, climate pledges for participants, and other options to build in greater consciousness of our programs’ environmental impacts. 
• CFHI builds human connections, nurtures diversity and inclusion, showcases human rights, and advocates for health of the entire planet. 
• CFHI offers programs whose primary curricular focus is Planetary Health, highlighting and in alignment with UN Sustainable Development Goals 2, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, & 15. 

Value 5 – Poorly designed voluntourism and programs based on neocolonial assumptions are dangerous, regressive, and antithetical to the field of Global Health

• CFHI provides programs and Field Experiences for students and universities (Academic Partners) that de-emphasize the agency of outside volunteers and emphasize the agency of local health systems and sustainable longitudinal approaches.
• CFHI enables students, trainees, and faculty to contribute to strengthening local health and social service systems through appropriately scoped supportive projects and activities including contributing to Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), co-education initiatives, program evaluations, technical and non-technical activities aligned with skills sets of visitors, and reinforcement of local expertise/realization of global citizenship for local leaders/community members.
• CFHI challenges neocolonial assumptions and behavior from theoretical to practical aspects of programming and by nurturing value-aligned partnerships with academic institutions. 
• CFHI provides universities with alternatives to poorly designed voluntourism opportunities, which endanger participants and host communities.  
• CFHI researches and advocates for reforms throughout the Short-Term Experiences in Global Health (STEGH) sector. 
• We maintain a humble approach to our work and recognize that we all have internalized forms of colonialism and bias. We seek to actively unlearn these beliefs through training, dedicated focus, and specific goals as a global team. 
• CFHI draws from the expertise of global partners and bidirectionally flows information back to local partners and teams to ensure these organizational values are upheld at all levels.
• CFHI provides training to faculty, administrators, staff and program providers to encourage ethical, safe, rigorous experiential learning and other programming by the entire Global Health Education sector. 

Value 6- We believe in high impact programs

• We measure the impacts of our programs on participants, host communities, and the Global Health education sector through collaborative research, surveys of global partners and students, and during site visits. 
• We use multiple tools to measure the impacts of our programs including the Global Engagement Survey (GES), Intercultural Effectiveness Scale (IES), GlobeSmart by Aperian Global, and various university research collaborations.
• We set out competency-based impact goals for participants and scholars. 

Value 7- We strive for Fair-Trade Learning ideals through a CFHI lens

• CFHI highlights the primacy of local community members as leaders, change agents, and sustainable solutions.  
• We build programs on strong partnership foundations, aligning with partners on all levels of programming and seeking to meet FTL rubric ideals 
• We utilize an asset-based narrative, development and engagement approach, to showcase strengths within resource-limited settings, where others see poverty and lacking, we focus on the abundance of passion, resourcefulness, ingenuity, and perseverance.  
• We meet regularly as a full Global Team and within smaller working groups to assess CFHI’s Fair-Trade approach and make changes as needed to ensure a more equitable approach to our work.