Desiree LaBeaud and members of the community-based organization HERI Kenya in 2023. LaBeaud, with her longtime Kenyan research collaborators Francis Mutuku and...
A new book co-edited by Stanford’s Desiree LaBeaud explores transforming research and changing lives through equitable partnerships that focus on human connections.
In a time of immense global challenges and uncertainty, global health leaders Desiree LaBeaud and Anna Stewart-Ibarra insist on joy: joy that comes from close human connection and aligning your values with your work.
LaBeaud, Stanford’s associate dean of global health at the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health and professor of pediatrics and professor of pediatrics, and Stewart-Ibarra, executive director of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, met through a collaborative research project investigating climate’s impact on dengue virus in Kenya and Ecuador. They quickly connected.
“From the beginning, we worked together as scientists from a space of openness, learning from each other, and a desire to collaborate and engage respectfully with people from different cultures and countries with whom we were working,” said Stewart-Ibarra.
So, when Stewart-Ibarra was invited to write a book about global health partnerships at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she invited LaBeaud to join her. They embarked on a five-year collaboration that brought together 90 authors across 26 countries to share case studies and reflections examining the past, present, and future of global health partnerships.
Their book, Transforming Global Health Partnerships (free online through Springer), offers a new framework and paradigm for collaborative, equitable partnerships built on trust and sustained by the joy of close human connection. Such collaborations, they say, can serve as a model for addressing some of the world’s most complex and pressing challenges, from pandemics to climate change.