Transcripts For CSPAN3 Key Capitol Hill Hearings 20240622 :

CSPAN3 Key Capitol Hill Hearings June 22, 2024

Here. It is interesting, the Faith Community has been a partner in response to hiv since the beginning of the epidemic both domestically and globally. So i think pet far was an out growth with faithbased organizations on the domestic side for a number of years. When we really began looking at the disproportionate impact of the epidemic in africa back in the late 1990s and early 2000, it was a lot our interest and a lot of the pressure that was brought to bear on the u. S. Government and policymakers was from faithbased organizations who were on the ground in africa seeing the devastation that was occurring on the continent. So theyve been a natural partner for us faithbased organizations and faith backers have been a natural partner with those of us working in the hiv and aids response from the beginning. So when we began to expand the global perspective to focus on hiv and to put this in perspective, working in the white house, with the global aids budget had been 125 million a year for seven years in a row which now is a rounding error in our pep far program, so when the interest started, faithbased organizations were at the forefront of encouraging us to respond in a very robust way. And that of course ultimately led to to the development of pet far. But i would add that the faithbased partnerships were were not based on politics. They were based on pragmatism. People on the ground that had access and trust in the communities, all of the things that we knew we needed and partners in pep far they were a primary and natural for us. It is so interesting how all of this has evolved and well get into more of the spectrum of groups and the challenges and opportunities that that has presented. But that leads in perhaps in for mark to tell us about your office at u. S. Aid. What is the goal and what is your out reach and your strategy. Sure. So i have the great privilege to head this office at u. S. Aid and its origin is back around 2003 under the Bush Administration and trying to do a more systemic and engagement with the Faith Community. That said weve been working with faith groups since the inception of the agency 52 odd years ago so this wasnt new to the agency it was a new way of looking at it and to reach out to a Broader Group of partners and that is a guiding star for the agency. If you think about buckets of work, certainly to be the ombudsman into the agency the sherpa, the groups that want to work with u. S. Aid and dont know how to get into the door of bankruptcy, can come to us. Groups can act like an ombudsman, we can help finding facilitations for faithbased and Community Groups and try to do proactive out groups, so around ebola as a recent example. We organized with the white house and the department of state a Conference Call with faithbased actors across the United States and we had 400 people on that call to talk about ebola and the role the Faithbased Community might play and we did smaller groups in d. C. With 30 or 40 organizations. So there is a con seening role convening role of the organization. And supporting the other parts of u. S. Aid trying to get things done. So we support the missions in their engagement and that is a critical part of aid. For a Big Government agency we are decentralized. Our missions are vital and decisionmaking happens much there and so those are all of the ways this we try to put it in and we try to make it our engagement in the Faith Community as robust as possible especially when there are areas like health in emergencies when the Faithbased Community have unique things to bring to the table. Thank you. One of the things that came up, in fact, on the last panel was how much of the share of the u. S. Government support goes through faithbased organizations and so many of us turn to kaiser for that kind of analysis and i wonder, jen if you could tell us more about how that how much kaiser has approached that and why that is a complicated set of numbers to find . Thanks janet. And i just want to say that i want to commend the lancet and the authors who put this issue together to start where we pick up and formalize an evidenced based framework that is so critical that i dont think has existed at this level at looking at faithbased organizations and health. And so for this question and what we ask at kaiser what happens now and what is the scope of the involvement and mark and i were talking in advance of this and clearly money is just one measure of this. There is many more ways to look at involvement. Money is one that we all care about and Pay Attention to and so in preparation for thinking about that question i will share some data that we just looked at and really good work being done now on this. Researchers and others looked e. R. A. Sently at health and there is an article that came out on this roughly estimated that over the last decade or more 30 of all Health System for health has been through faithbased organizations. There is a lot there but i encourage people to look at that article in plus journal, so that is available online. The other piece of work of done is jeans work looking specifically at the share of revenues that faithbased organizations have that are from u. S. Government sources and she found 13 . So i think it is less than people think in their minds. So in preparation for this panel, i took a look at data we recently released around nongovernmental organizations. Another proud area that faithbased groups dont know about, what is the role of ngos and we put out a couple of reports on this and we put out a summary analysis on this and what do we know about faithbased organizations in that framework and we looked at 2013 data, 2014 is just available now. But 2013 data, disbursements by u. S. Aid and there is caveats there and just looking at that year, we were able to identify that faithbased organizations represents about 15 of ngos that receive disbursement of Global Health. So 15 of ngos were faith boised. And it is good to look at historical analysis and see how that has changed. And faithbased organizations within the Ngos Community were working in africa, not a surprise to those of us here but an important data point. And the area they were most likely working in was hiv and malaria was a big one and malaria and hiv than ngos over all, less so than Family Planning. We like to look more in depth but to give you a sense. In africa, and malaria and probably less funding than people think. I will give you the Funding Amount because i can see people wondering what that amount is. It was about 96 million in 2013, for what to give you a sense. That is less than the global fund amount identified in the imhe analysis. Were going to run through a series of questions and come back and give you a sense to interact with each other. Perhaps linked to this, the question of who are who are these organizations and where are they and what are they working on sandy you have described from your long years of works the spectrum of the kinds of organizations that helps to under score the opportunities and challenges of working with them. Perhaps you could talk more about what you mean when you talk about different approaches needed for different kinds of faithbased organizations . Sure. Thank you. I think this is this is a genesis of some of the challenges weve had around building these partnerships between faithbased organizations and governments because it is hard to to if we say faithbased organizations, that means a lot of things. Faithbased organizations can range from anything from the catholic Health System in the United States of america which is still and im using the u. S. As an example which is still the second Largest Health care system in the country to very small clinics or ngos or or fans or children on the ground. So there is an incredible broad range. Differences in capacity very big differences in ability to deliver services. And so i think our challenge, all of our challenges to both donors and to faithbased organizations is to begin to define with greater specificity and communicate what the differences are for people. And it certainly came up a lot in the meeting held at the bank this week and has before. And i think when we look at revamping our mechanisms, in order to be more effective build more effective partnerships, we have got to be able to name those things so that when we have partnerships and define roles and responsibilities and establish monitoring and evaluation and accountability and mechanisms and so forth, we have to be very clear about what we are doing with and it can be very big or very small. But what you dont want to lose in that is that we know from all of our years in Public Health, that if we want to really look at sustainable change at the end of the day, that and we want to be able to have countries take full responsibility and ownership of the work that is being done in thur countries, that that has to be rooted on the ground in grassroots organizations all over the country. So if we want to sustain the impact that weve had in pet far or look at sustainability development, we have to figure this out. So we need to stay at it until we do. It wont be easy. It is like family dynamic, it is not easy but you dont abandon the family, you stay in there and work at it and that is where we are in this conversation and it is very exciting. It is interesting because one of the pieces of sustainability, which is of course a big theme here in washington and everywhere, is also the link to the private sector. And the longer term financing issues that link to sustainability. And mark, you have talked about the added financial value of working with faithbased organizations and the outreach. Can you describe a little bit more about your outreach to faithbased groups as a link to the private sector . Sure. I think there are two elements of this. One is that faithbased organizations like most nongovernmental organizations have robust fund raising largely from the private sector and they have partnerships via boards and other mechanisms in which theyve been engaging the private sector since theyve existed and had to do that. The other is a more directive to say as were looking at the importance of the private sector in development, health care in particular, one way we can think about the Faith Community, the Business People motivated by faith but will never put a religious icon on what they do. For example, there is a project they are working on at u. S. Aid about to be finalized on health a small Health Experiment to see if business principals can provide sustainability in provision of health care and clean water and others in the eastern democratic republic of congo and a consortium of Business Leaders connected to the National Business foundation in the United States have put up a Million Dollars of that partnership that were working together. And the National Christian foundation the philanthropy that flows through every year is hundreds of millions of dollars. Part of that will go to international activities. We havent formalized partner shirps with that kind of flow to capital as well as the expertise within that community to bring it to bear and i think that is Fertile Ground to build on. Jen, youve done a lot of work over the years on the u. S. Response to the aids epidemic of course, and as we discussed in the first panel and in the lancet piece, we saw the importance of some of the faithbased organizations roll in that response as well as the Ebola Response that was touched on also in the first panel. Do you want to reflect a little bit more on your view of how that has had an impact in u. S. Response . Sure. To pick up on something sandy said about the role of faithbased organizations an the Faith Community and hiv from day one, that is clear in the u. S. Domestic case as well as globally but i also think it is really important to note that from the case study perspective of pet far, how did pet far come to be, when we come back and try to look together what are the elements that went into many of us watching the state of the union speech and hearing 15 billion and wondering how we were able to get there. It is clear without the Faith Community, that wouldnt have happened. So the Faith Community was from a case study the pet far, to making pet far happen. So it is not just on the ground delivering services and being partners but it really is pushing the u. S. Government to go to another level. So i think that is just really important from my perspective looking at it from the longterm. On the Ebola Response, it is pretty clear that without engaging the Faith Community the way governments had to do realizing they had to or we would not have been able to turn around that crisis. And hopefully the lessons from that experience will be evident and ready not just back on a shelf, but the next time a crisis like this occurred, whether it is ebola again or something else, it is at the forefront of this approaching communities with cultural understanding and engaging the leaders in the community that understand them and can speak to them is the only way we can really get ahead of this. It is quite clear there has been huge huge impact and benefit and also very big challenges that have been presented by the engagement particularly from the pet far perspective. Sandy, could you talk about some of the hardest parts of pet fars history in dealing with the Faith Community and what lessons have been learned and how has that impacted the current pet far strategy . Sure. I think that and again it was not new with pet far. Weve had challenged and in hiv and aids with the faithbased communities and incredible opportunities from the beginning. But it was certainly true. And pet far, i think that weve had to a couple of things. I think it has been very hard for a mechanism as big as pet far to find a way to operationalize our partnerships with faithbased organizations on the ground. And so that has been one. And then weve had stumbles around and challenges around issues of Reproductive Health around the Lgbt Community and weve seen that play out in recent days. But i think where we hang on this interestingly, it more in places like washington, d. C. And in our big institutions rather than on the ground. What i have found always so inspiring is the way that people who are actually on the ground doing this work figure out a way to Work Together. And oftentimes we at headquarters and policy making bodies we try to make it better, but sometimes i think we make it worse. Because people are so people are creative, especially people who are working on the ground in very hard to serve populations in the far reaching places in the world. The people figure this out. I think this is the place where we need to learn from colleagues on the ground and bring those Lessons Learned up to the top. There is something that dr. Blevins mentioned that we have to be careful in wanting to be so politically correct and in the way we engage as policymakers that we dont put people at risk. So we want to tell the story about the nuns who are buying Office Supplies for an ngo that is secular so they can trade and get condoms and not get caught by the bishop, in the old days and people figuring it out on their own, i think we need to take lessons from our colleagues on the ground. It continues to be a challenge for us. But the other thing that we talked about is finding Common Ground. And again, when we define with specificity what our roles and responsibilities are when we engage in a partnership, like a pre i dont know why im using marriage metaphors, but a prenup, but we know this is what we are bringing and you cant touch this and im not going to touch all of that, and we have to define with greater specificity how we engage and i think it takes mystery out of this if you have secular institutions and faithbased institutions. If you really dig down up front and define with greater specificity you can find the Common Ground and not put each other at risk any in way. And to be specific, we have some real controversies that have emerging, like in uganda, and would you like to hear from mark about that episode, putting the blabt community at such risk, the funding for the Interreligious Council being drawn because of that and what lessons were learned because of that and what new practices or vetting procedures or new mechanisms arose from that . I think i should summarize first just quickly, legislators within uganda proposed an antihomosexuality that was dack ownan as best in terms of the treatment of lbgt people and the description and of who they were in terms of people was beyond the pale. And the members of the religious council campaigned positively for that legislation and vocally took out ads in the paper, spoke at a huge rally and i was in uganda when this rally went on and you are listening to think and thinking this is just such a horrible situation and i think the u. S. Government lost confidence in the Interreligious Council to carry out the mandate and serve people without bias. It was so beyond the pail of what we normally saw in terms of actively campaigning among all of the Interreligious Council members. All

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