Cameron Clarke and Diversifying Global Health
Jersey City isn’t supposed to create Rhodes Scholars. The city, in the shadow of New York, a choppy, ten-minute water taxi away, serves as a midpoint between its more glamorous sister and Newark. Its downtown is chic, trendy and expensive, following the footprints of neighboring Hoboken and nearby Brooklyn. The rest of the city is racially diverse and, on the whole, a grittier place to live. It is the home of rabid Easter Bunnies and where a cop was shot at a Walgreens a block away from where high school students practiced tennis. It is a city where less than 70 percent of students in the Jersey City Public Schools ever receive their diploma.
Cameron Clarke is the rare exception. A 2017 Rhodes Scholar studying the application of statistics to public health policies at Oxford University, his family moved to Jersey City in 2008 specifically to earn the privilege of attending and graduating from the city’s-and arguably, the state’s-best public high school. The high school experience that Ronald E. McNair Academic, a small but nationally ranked local magnet tucked away on a quiet street in gentrified downtown Jersey City, is tailored to represent the best of Jersey City, namely its status as the second-most diverse city in America . It was chartered as an affirmative action school in the immediate aftermath of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, and strives for 25% distribution across all races when admitting students.
Cameron credits this experience with giving him the opportunity to engage with a variety of cultures and subsequently expand his worldview. In addition, its rigorous academic reputation is something he often credits with building his proactivity and work ethic.
Inevitably, this all soon came to pay off during his undergraduate years at Howard University in Washington, DC. Cameron had always maintained an interest in the field of global health, but Howard’s curriculum didn’t offer many academic opportunities to pursue the field. So when a friend reached out to him about potentially founding a GlobeMed chapter on Howard’s campus, he jumped at the chance.
“There are lot of organizations that are ostensibly similar to GlobeMed but the issue is that they cater to people with privilege and are not always as receptive to the needs of the community in the way that GlobeMed is.”
For Cameron, GlobeMed was not only instrumental in helping him understand the nuances of global health he missed in the classroom; it represented his first real foray into global health as something more than just an vested interest he meant to explore in his future. “I knew I wanted to serve in promoting health equity, so leading the GlobeMed chapter was a very difficult opportunity to pass up,” Cameron says. During the fall of his junior year, Cameron and a fellow student, Christina Amutah, worked together to develop the executive board of the Howard chapter. The paperwork alone took almost a full year before they were formally recognized. They couldn’t rent rooms because the group did not have status as a student organization, which made it difficult to convince potential members to attend chapter meetings. The answer? They would sneak into vacant rooms after hours and have conversations about public health.
This was Cameron’s favorite part about GlobeMed: gaining the opportunity to discuss relevant issues and share ideas with similarly interested students. “When we talked about the Flint water crisis, we didn’t focus on the water tasting bad, but the effect of contaminants on communities and whole generations,” he says.
GlobeMed at Howard was officially recognized in August 2016, meaning that Cameron missed out on participating in GlobeMed’s annual Grassroots Onsite Work (GROW) internship. Nevertheless, the experiences he gained through GlobeMed at Howard — first as a co-founder, and then as an executive board member — allowed him to work directly with, and have a hand in, establishing the chapter’s new partnership with Nancholi Youth Organization (NAYO) in Blantyre, Malawi. NAYO works primarily with children, families, and young adults on issues relating to HIV/AIDS, water and sanitation, and general public health work.
“It’s so important to have HBCUs and people of color, in particular, at the heart of the global health movement,” Cameron says. “It broadens our collective ability to see issues from different perspectives. I don’t think it’s possible to solve systemic injustices without including people who represent the consequences of what could happen if we get these things wrong.”
GlobeMed has 12 minority-serving institutions (MSIs) in its network, supported by Global Health Fellow Program-II’s (GHFP-II) mission to “build a diverse global health career pipeline by facilitating early-career overseas internships for diverse undergraduate students from backgrounds underrepresented in global health.” Through GlobeMed and GHFP-II, students who attend historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) like Howard have been able to affect change on multiple levels: on a global scale, as they work with partner organizations around the world to leverage community-based change, and within the global health community as a whole, as GlobeMed and GHFP-II work to diversify this field with new, often marginalized voices and identities.
And there’s something to be said for Cameron’s innate awareness of his identity, and the ways in which that has shaped all his academic paths and budding career — from the experiences at McNair, to his motivations to become a public health doctor at an early age, to the ideas he was exposed to as Howard. In fact, Cameron credits GlobeMed for strengthening his conviction to become a doctor — and the changes he wants to implement with his career.
“When you walk through the communities that I’ve come from and worked in, you see a lot of health issue. You can present health policy reforms, but if you don’t have the medical resources to go with those proposals, then you don’t have a cohesive health system,” Cameron says. “Health policy is the priority, but I see that without the actual medical professionals to implement that health policy, your health policy is inadequate. That’s why I want to be on both sides.”
Originally published at https://www.globemed.org on November 28, 2017.
