How we work with NGOs and the non-profit sector
This week, we are pleased to have announced a new dissemination partnership with Sightsavers. This partnership will use our journals and other communications channels to ensure the outcomes of Sightsavers’ projects reach a broad audience – in terms of location and sector.
This is an extremely exciting milestone for RSTMH, as a goal of our current five-year strategy is to work more closely with NGOs and non-profit organisations, to help disseminate their work, as well as share their learnings and experience.
This ambition also extends to other communities including veterinary, nursing, community health, the social sciences and industry.
Collaboration and partnerships
To achieve our ambitious goals around eradicating diseases and improving equity in health, we know we need to collaborate across all sectors. These partnerships will help us to address the challenges of access to health, as well as the broader issues that hold progress back, such as poverty, conflict, and economic, social, political and environmental matters.
We measure progress against our goals by the support we give to RSTMH members in their careers, as well as the way we bring together diverse voices and use our collective experience and knowledge to call for change in policy, funding and research or to raise awareness of challenges and issues. Our ability to deliver against these goals is shaped by the range of experience and expertise in our networks.
We hope this partnership will lead to more collaboration with the NGO sector and to more members joining us from NGOs and non-profit organisations.
During the last few years, we have been working hard to encourage those working for NGOs to get to know the Society, through our support for partner events such as MSF’s Scientific Days and NNN’s Annual Meetings, as well as two newer initiatives.
grow
The first of these is grow, which we launched last year. grow is a new website which holds current opportunities in global health, whether that be jobs, courses, funding, PhD opportunities, or research or voluntary placements. They are from non-profit organisations, as well as the health, academic and private sectors, and cover a wide range of disciplines.
We launched grow as a response to many people asking us for support and direction in their next career stage, especially those who want to work in global health but are not technically trained, or on a traditional career course.
Our aim is to bring these opportunities together to make it easier for people who have an interest in global health to take the first step, or indeed the next step. Over the last year the pandemic has served as a catalyst for many people to apply their skills and knowledge to the global health sector, whether or not they have worked directly in this field before. We hope grow is a useful resource for this.
Lessons from the Field
The second initiative was launched in 2019, a new article type in our journal Transactions, called Lessons from the Field. This was a direct result of speaking to NGOs during the Ebola outbreak and hearing the challenges around sharing learnings and lessons with the scientific community.
This kind of important information can sometimes fall through the cracks of scientific research and traditional news media, especially if they are short and not part of formal research. For us it is also hugely valuable for the journals to have content which is focused on how health programmes are implemented.
Lessons from the Field are shorter articles and more flexible in style, which is helpful for authors. This also means that the content can move through the production process a little more quickly, and so this information can be made available in a more timely way.
Over the coming year we hope to explore with our NGO and other non-profit partners ways in which we can help both disseminate their work to new or broader audiences, and include their voices in our work as much as possible, to help achieve positive change in the sector.
Our thanks to Sightsavers and their partners for this opportunity.
