Dear friends and colleagues,
We are a group of health professionals interested in health for all people.  We would like to learn more about how to apply a human rights framework to our work and we are emailing you and others to get a sense of how many people would be interested in joining us in a Health and Human Rights (HHR) Learning Circle.  If you would like to participate, please go to http://hhrlearningcircle.wetpaint.com/and to sign up.

What is a Learning Circle?
We view a learning circle as a place to learn and grow.  Everyone’s experience is welcome and you don’t have to have a background in public health or human rights.  The common thread is that we all care about the world around us and are interested in learning more about health and human rights. We will meet for several months to use articles, personal experience and stories, and other forms of media to learn more about this approach.  We hope this will influence our personal lives, our work, and hopefully the Bay Area.

Our goal in creating a learning circle is to build and strengthen a community of allies.  This includes people who work in public health as well as any people who believe that creating healthy communities is essential to building a more just world.  As many areas of our society impact people’s health - like education, housing, economics, transportation, criminal justice, and land use - even if you don’t consider yourself connected to public health, we hope you might consider joining us.

*****************************
Health and Human Rights Learning Circle Objectives:
·  Build community among health workers, healers, allies, activists, organizers
·  Learn about, understand, and be able to communicate the HHR framework
·  Consider how to use the HHR framework to build an effective, cross-sectoral, cross-issue Bay Area movement for health and social justice

To achieve the objectives it is important that all participants are able to join us for all the sessions. We anticipate the structure and schedule will be:
·  To meet once a month for 4 months (tentatively March – June, 2010)
·  To meet twice in San Francisco and twice in the East Bay. If you have access to free meeting space we could use, please let us know.
·  To involve some manageable preparatory reading before each session and a willingness to share your thoughts, ideas and passion
·  Once we know how many people are interested and able to attend, we will structure the meetings to ensure active participation by all.
*****************************
Background
Last June, some of us attended the First Annual South Los Angeles Health and Human Rights Conference (http://www.southlahealthandhumanrights.org/). We joined over 700 other attendees from South LA, and national and international supporters, to discuss how a health and human rights framework could facilitate understanding and acting on inequity and injustice in South LA and beyond. For more information on the conference, you can go here or here.
The success of this meeting led us to think about whether this approach could be effective in the Bay Area.  Realizing that we all had different understandings of what a health and human rights framework is, we decided to start a study group to learn about human rights, the right to health, and where and how this approach is being used nationally and globally to demand and create change to improve health for all. For more information on the relationship between health and human rights, see our new website at http://hhrlearningcircle.wetpaint.com/.

******************************

How to participate
If you would like to participate, please go to http://hhrlearningcircle.wetpaint.com/ sign up to join our group website by February 15th. We will follow up with you via the website. If you don’t think you can attend this time, but would like to be informed about any future activities, please also join the Wetpaint site and we’ll keep you updated. You can also get the resource materials and participate in discussions there.

If you are not interested or able to participate, but know someone else who might be, we encourage you to forward this message.

Thanks for your time and consideration!  We hope you will be able to join us!
Megan Gaydos, Oakland SOL, San Francisco Department of Public Health*, Oakland, CA
Laura Turiano, People’s Health Movement, Oakland
Katherine Schaff, Alameda County Public Health Department*, Oakland, CA
Alex Desautels, Alameda County Public Health Department*, Oakland, CA
Amie Fishman, Catalyst Project, San Francisco
Dorothy Tegeler, Hesperian Foundation, People’s Health Movement, Berkeley, CA
Sarah Shannon, Hesperian Foundation, People’s Health Movement, Berkeley, CA

*For identification purposes only

--
Sarah Shannon
Executive Director
Hesperian -  Information for Community Health and Empowerment
1919 Addison St. #304
Berkeley, CA. 94704
(510) 845-1447 ext. 206
www.hesperian.org

Visit our NEW Spanish-language website: http://espanol.hesperian.org