Here at CHORI, we strive to be an active participant in the local community, engaging with health issues that are of particular concern to the Oakland community, such as asthma, diabetes, and sickle cell disease.

But our goals at CHORI include improving health and wellbeing across the globe as well. We have a great opportunity, and, I believe, a great obligation, to utilize the fantastic wealth of our resources to help those who need it most. While many research programs at CHORI have had this focus at their heart for many years, we have recently brought the efforts of all these individuals together under the umbrella of the Children’s Global Health Initiative (CGHI).

The mission of the award-winning CGHI at Children’s Hospital Oakland and CHORI combined (Children’s Hospital Research Center Oakland) is to relieve suffering and meet the needs of children worldwide in an environment of trust, compassion and care by developing sustainable programs on the ground.

We do this through fostering international partnerships that lay the groundwork to engage in different kinds of global outreach, from creating exchanges in which health professionals from developing countries come to the United States for advanced education, to sending our researchers to developing countries to provide both technology and training in the use of that technology.

We have scientists working with the World Health Organization (WHO) to create and distribute vaccines and to improve nutritional health through providing something as simple as an iron and micronutrient supplements to women of childbearing age. We have clinicians training rural caregivers in how to care for infants in an intensive care setting, or training local surgeons in various operations in children with curable conditions.

These are but a few of the ways in which we are working to provide the training, education and access to technology to make a difference in the world. Our programs focus on providing the resources not just to help in this moment, but to help over the long term, providing a long-lasting sustainability, with people on the ground who can carry on the work long after we have gone. In this way, we strive to make both our local community and our global community a better place, one patient, one program, one country at a time.