5 Key Lessons from the Oxford Next Horizons Programme

Co-Directors Elizabeth Kiss Warden & CEO of the Rhodes Trust and Professor Jane Shaw, Principal of Harris Manchester College , and a Pro-Vice-Chancellor, University of Oxford share emerging insights from the first year of this innovative programme.

Launched in 2022, and with its first cohort arriving in January 2024, the Oxford Next Horizons Programme (ONHP) is a pioneering six-month residential programme designed for individuals in the later stages of their careers. Next Horizons offers participants access to Oxford University’s vast intellectual resources and is based at two of the University’s most distinctive communities — Harris Manchester College, dedicated to non-traditional age students, and Rhodes House, home to the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship.

The programme has proven to be a transformative journey, not only for its first cohort of 19 scholars and 4 associated partners, but also for its two host institutions, the Rhodes Trust and Harris Manchester College. Here we reflect on the success of the programme’s inaugural year, and its potential for lasting impact on our respective missions to foster lifelong learning.

1. The Power of Diverse Perspectives

The inaugural ONHP cohort was a vibrant mix of individuals from a broad spectrum of fields — ranging from education and medicine to technology and government service. This diversity wasn’t just a hallmark of the programme; it was its driving force.

In a room of 19 talented individuals, each voiced a distinctive approach to the question of what makes a good life, and to solving the big problems of today, the guiding questions of the programme’s two key seminars. This also highlighted a fundamental truth: when people from different sectors come together, they don’t just share their knowledge — they create a fertile ground for innovation. The varied backgrounds and perspectives within the cohort demonstrated that everyone’s insights can contribute to a more comprehensive, sometimes startlingly new, understanding of the issues at hand.

2. Embracing Change: Plans and Priorities Evolve (And That’s Okay!)

When the first cohort of ONHP Scholars arrived, each member came with a distinct and deeply personal vision for their time in Oxford and the projects they intended to pursue. However, as the programme unfolded, it became clear that flexibility and openness to change were just as important as the initial plans themselves.

It was both enlightening and inspiring to observe how various factors — whether it be new academic insights, unexpected collaborations, or personal reflections — began to shape and influence the scholars’ original intentions. Many participants found themselves on journeys they hadn’t anticipated, bravely welcoming transformative changes into their lives and projects. Rather than clinging rigidly to their initial goals, the scholars demonstrated remarkable adaptability, allowing their experiences in Oxford to guide them in new directions.

3. Building Lifelong Bonds: The Importance of Community and Connection

A defining strength of Next Horizons was its emphasis on cultivating a strong sense of community and connection among its participants. From the very beginning, the programme was designed not just as an academic journey, but as an experience that would forge deep, lasting relationships among scholars and with the wider community.

Close-knit relationships developed within the cohort, and in turn the cohort contributed in valuable ways to the deep sense of community at both Harris Manchester College and the Rhodes Trust.

4. Pushing Boundaries: The Value of Stepping Outside Comfort Zones

One of the most transformative aspects of Next Horizons was its deliberate focus on encouraging scholars to step outside their comfort zones. From the outset, the programme was designed to push participants beyond their usual boundaries, fostering both personal growth and a deeper sense of community. This is a powerful reminder that growth often comes from the challenges we least expect.

The Co-Directors and staff of Next Horizons also embraced this philosophy by taking on the creative challenge of designing programme activities that encouraged participants to explore new and unfamiliar territories. Vital to the success of this experience was the balance between stepping into the unknown and remaining anchored in a supportive, trusted community.

5. Learning at Every Step: The Significance of Intergenerational Learning

During their time at Oxford, the Next Horizons Scholars immersed themselves in a vibrant network, forging connections with the students, staff and Fellows of Harris Manchester College, Rhodes Scholars in Residence and members of Rhodes’ partnership programmes. Engaging in a book club, speed mentoring sessions, and collaborative projects, they exchanged ideas and experiences across various life stages and career paths.

This cross-generational dialogue not only enriched the learning journey of the participants but also underscored the power of mentorship and collaboration within our community, bridging generational gaps and fostering lasting bonds.

Find out more about Oxford Next Horizons

Oxford Alumni can join Dr. Kiss and Professor Shaw on 21 September 2024 at the Oxford Meeting Minds event for an engaging session, “What Constitutes a Meaningful Life?” and Other Big Questions, where they’ll explore the Oxford Next Horizons Programme and delve into thought-provoking topics that shape our understanding of purpose and fulfilment.

Insights from the Inside was originally published in Oxford University on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discover the extraordinary story of Carl Subak, whose passion for numismatics and spirit of generosity is helping to ensure a vibrant future for the study and safeguarding of coins in Oxford.

Last year the Ashmolean Museum’s Heberden Coin Room received a legacy gift of $5 million from Carl Subak, an American coin dealer whose collaboration with the coin room spanned many decades. Carl died at the age of 103 in Chicago, his adopted home after fleeing Nazi persecution in Austria as a teenager.

Professor Frédérique Duyrat and Professor Chris Howgego from the museum tell us about the man whose love of coins continued into his tenth decade and share the lasting impact his donation will make on the world of numismatics.

Childhood finds on the banks of the Danube

If you haven’t already fallen for the magic of coins, then you might be wondering what it is that people find so captivating about them. ‘You can tell any kind of story with coins,’ says Professor Frédérique Duyrat, Director of Collections and Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room, one of the world’s leading coin cabinets. ‘Stories about history, religion, archaeology, landscapes… it’s fantastically exciting.’

It’s an excitement that was shared by avid coin collector and dealer Carl. He was just five years old when he came into possession of his first coin, discovered on the land his family managed just northeast of Vienna, Austria.

The location has a rich history: between the 1st and 4th century AD it was home to Carnuntum, a significant metropolis on the border of the Roman Empire. Coins and other artefacts from the city’s heyday were revealed to its 20th-century inhabitants during the spring ploughing, and when Carl was good, his reward was to choose from the treasures that had been uncovered.

Flight from danger

Carl was a precocious coin collector and by his teens was already attending some of the great pre-war auctions in Vienna. His passion did occasionally outstrip his means, however: he became so excited during one visit to a London dealer that he chose many more coins than he could afford to buy. Happily, he was allowed to take them all away and pay later — a kindness he never forgot.

In 1938, when Carl was 19, Nazi Germany annexed Austria. He fled the country and, after waiting many months in Latvia, had the good fortune to receive a visa to the United States. His US backers were a family from Boston who he had met by chance while at a holiday camp in England.

Carl worked in Boston as a plumber’s assistant, chauffeur and bookstore clerk, before being recruited into a special programme at Camp Ritchie that trained native German speakers to return to Europe and take part in various missions. As one of the ‘Ritchie Boys’, Carl worked as an interpreter for a US army colonel and was stationed for many months in the American zone in Berlin. While overseas, he finished his undergraduate degree at Harvard University in Geography.

At the close of the war, Carl joined his sister who had moved to Seattle from Boston after escaping from Vienna via Italy. He began an import-export business with his brother-in-law, which eventually became a stamp wholesale enterprise and coin dealership. In 1949 he relocated to Chicago, where he and his wife Eileen built one of the region’s most successful coin and stamp shops.

The beginning of something special

Carl travelled the world for his work and it was a chance meeting at a train station in England in the 1960s that sparked a decades-long relationship with the Ashmolean Museum.

The man Carl had bumped into was Michael Metcalf, then Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room. Professor Chris Howgego, who later held the same role, also came to know Carl well, describing him as incredibly intelligent and savvy, yet modest. ‘He didn’t have a big ego; he wouldn’t impose his own ideas but was instead interested in how things would actually work,’ Chris says.

Carl was a generous supporter of the coin room during his lifetime, helping with the acquisition of several major hoards, including the Watlington Hoard and the Chalgrove Hoard — the latter of which turned out to be extraordinary for its inclusion of a coin revealing the ‘lost emperor’ Domitianus.

He also funded the publication of a number of books and, after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a studentship for numismatists from countries belonging to the former Eastern bloc. ‘These were people on the whole who either hadn’t the money or perhaps even the permission to travel before,’ says Chris, now Research Keeper at the Heberden Coin Room. ‘Carl saw it as a moment of freedom and an opportunity to get people out and to come and meet us. It was an inspirational piece of help and I believe he was thinking about his own experience of fleeing Austria before the war.’

Despite growing older, Carl continued to travel and kept incredibly fit, hiking in the mountains well into his 80s. He used to leave pairs of walking boots at friends’ houses so that he could strike out whenever the mood took hold. Carl was also a great storyteller and towards the end of his life began to reminisce, says Chris. ‘He had a perspective that very few people did.’

The gift of flexibility

Carl passed away in 2022, leaving $5 million to the Heberden Coin Room in his will. The gift, which has been divided between research and acquisitions, promises to be transformational. ‘For me it’s priceless,’ says current Keeper Frédérique. ‘It puts us in a much safer place and gives us the sort of agility that we have almost completely lost with the grant system that we have now.

‘His generosity was such that it will allow us to decide freely which research we would like to support, and it will give us the flexibility and opportunity to develop research along several axes,’ she explains. As well as supporting existing projects, such as Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire, Frédérique plans to use the gift to fund work in emerging fields and ‘encourage new thinking and new paths.’

As for the acquisitions portion of Carl’s donation, the hope is that it will allow the museum to acquire important coins that have been unable to find homes in other public collections. ‘We have a fantastic opportunity to make sure that these items don’t go back to commerce, but stay in the museum with us,’ Frédérique says.

A future-facing centenarian

The Heberden Coin Room celebrated its centenary in 2022. Despite its grand age, it is an institution firmly looking to the future.

Current projects include employing Chat GPT to develop abbreviated legends on provincial coins (‘a nightmare if you’re not a specialist,’ says Chris), and using subatomic particles to investigate the elemental composition of the gold coins of Rome and its African and Asian neighbours. The Ashmolean will also open a major exhibition later this year called Money Talks: Art, Society and Power, which will explore the place of money in our world through different artistic lenses.

Donors like Carl are playing a crucial role in helping the coin room to thrive in the 21st century. Reflecting on his motivation for giving, Chris describes Carl as a collector who could see beyond coins. ‘He knew perfectly well that there were bigger things in the world that he could give money to. He felt he was wealthy but not wealthy enough that he could shift the dial on global poverty, but that by giving money to something he cared about, he could make a difference.’

That difference will be keenly felt in Oxford, and in the wider world of numismatics, for many years to come.

Leaving a legacy to Oxford

Legacies provide an important source of funding for the University, enabling it to safeguard, research and showcase the collections in its care. If you would like to discuss leaving a gift to Oxford in your will, please contact our legacies team at legacies@devoff.ox.ac.uk or on 01865 611520.

The coin collector’s legacy was originally published in Oxford University on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Alive, Alive Oh …

Molly Malone’s plight exposes the unequal burdens of infectious disease

Dublin’s ‘sweet Molly Malone’ is a well-known sight on the city’s tourist map, and her ballad ‘Cockles and Mussels’ has been recorded by musicians from The Dubliners to Joni Mitchell. However, the story of the Irish capital city’s unofficial daughter is darker than its catchy tune implies. Shellfish hawker Molly dies “of a fever”, which may well have been typhoid. Exploring this tragic side of Molly’s anthem not only highlights the death and terror caused by the disease around 1900, but also the role of precarity and neglect in driving it.

Typhoid fever is caused by the bacterium Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi (S. Typhi) and spreads from person to person through food and water contaminated with human faeces. Although the disease is no longer common in Europe and America, typhoid remains a major public health threat in low- and middle-income countries where it sickens an estimated 9 million people and 110,000 people die from it every year. What is more, flooding and draughts caused by the climate emergency and rising antimicrobial resistance threaten a future resurgence.

In this situation, the history of earlier control efforts offers valuable insights and warnings on how to design or not to design public health interventions. During the 19th century, Dublin, which was still part of the British Empire, had gained international notoriety for its high typhoid levels. An 1888 investigation found that British troops garrisoned in the city had a 40 percent higher case rate for enteric infections than the UK average. Between 1890 and 1891, Dublin made further headlines when five members of Nationalist politician James O’Connor’s family died after eating contaminated shellfish — a tragedy captured in James Joyce’s Ullysses (1920) — and Prince George of Wales (the future George V) fell ill with typhoid shortly after an autumn visit to Dublin.

The Dublin official responsible for public health, Sir Charles Cameron, was well aware of the threat posed by typhoid — and, after typhoid epidemics in the city in 1891 and 1893, commented on the fact that disease incidence was far more common among the urban poor than selective press attention for outbreaks amongst the wealthier implied. Although Dublin had invested considerable resources in new water and sewage systems, typhoid had remained stubbornly prevalent. To his credit, Cameron recognised that some of this prevalence was driven by the city’s broader social problems — namely, that over a third of its population lived in precarious circumstances. The damp, drafty rooms of Dublin’s notoriously overcrowded tenement houses were perhaps the most visceral symbol of the city’s nineteenth-century economic decline. Many tenement inhabitants could not afford the basic necessities of life — food, fuel, and adequate clothing — and had to share insufficient sanitary facilities, generally limited to a single water pump and toilet in a communal yard. Such unsanitary living conditions were a hotbed for direct typhoid transmission.

Unfortunately, urban infrastructure development exacerbated problems by taking little account of working-class needs. Historically, many poor Dubliners had consumed locally sourced shellfish to supplement their bread-based diet. The late 19th century saw many of the shellfish beds supplying this inexpensive protein become contaminated due to Dublin’s growing population and the increasing discharge of raw sewage. Although Dublin authorities such as Charles Cameron had warned about the link between shellfish contamination and typhoid outbreaks as early as 1880, the city’s new sewage system (completed 1906) discharging partially treated sewage just off the entrance to Dublin Port failed to resolve the issue. Unsurprisingly, typhoid prevalence was particularly pronounced amongst those depending on the shellfish trade for their living. Although ‘sweet Molly’ may well have been fictional, our reconstruction of historical case rates shows that many hawkers like her would have been exposed to both infectious shellfish and the polluted environment in which they were produced. Meanwhile, authorities’ attempts to stop typhoid transmission by putting up signs warning of local shellfish did little to provide alternative protein sources or incomes for those affected.

Dublin eventually gained control over its typhoid rates with a mix of improved public health surveillance, health care, welfare, and sanitation. However, this was not a straightforward development but a drawn-out process with public health officials warning about local shellfish until the 1980s and sewage pollution of Dublin Bay continuing to cause problems.

Far from being a simple story of providing drinking water and sewage solutions, Dublin’s history shows how controlling a disease like typhoid depends on understanding the interrelation of local environments and livelihoods. To this day, contracting typhoid through exposure to polluted food or water remains an acute risk in countries without safe sewage disposal– or where humans are asked to service sewage systems without adequate protection. Dublin’s unofficial anthem of ‘Sweet Molly’ and her ‘Cockles and Mussels’ serves as a stark reminder that tackling the social inequality that drives disease exposure is a prerequisite for public health.

Our new exhibition ‘Typhoid, Cockles & Terrorism: How a Disease shaped Modern Dublin’ launched on 16th June 2024.

The Typhoidland team are: Dr Claas Kirchhelle (Inserm), Dr Carly Collier (UCD), Dr Samantha Vanderslott (Oxford), and Dr Emily Webster (Durham). To find out more visit: www.typhoidland.org.

Alive, Alive Oh … was originally published in Oxford University on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Manual scavengers — the outlawed workforce keeping India’s sanitation system running

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent success in the Indian elections marks a continuation of his 10 years in power with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). However, caste politics, for example in the hesitation of BJP to pursue positive discrimination policies, proved to be one of the reasons for the losses for the BJP, who no longer hold an absolute majority. The election issue about how to make India a more equal society, and especially reforming the caste system, is one that repeatedly resurfaces.

An emblematic political focus has been on improving the lives of sanitation workers whose ranks have historically been filled by so-called lower castes — most strikingly the roles taken by manual scavengers or, to use the Hindi term, ‘Safai Karamcharis’, who manually clean human waste in the sanitary system. This often dangerous work involves the cleaning, carrying, handling or disposing of human faeces with minimal or no equipment and in very challenging environments, including sewers, latrines, and open drains, where scavengers have suffocated to death.

Scavenging has been officially outlawed — a seemingly simple solution to a practice with considerable occupational health risks involved and a reaction to rid society of a problem they would rather not see. However, unofficially the practice continues in high numbers and also adds to the continuation of caste-based stigma. The 2013 Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act (PEMSR) made the employment of scavengers illegal, but there have been no convictions, and the rehabilitation efforts of the Act for new employment have also been ineffective, in part due to unclear legal stipulations.

The opposition Congress party argued in the recent 2024 election campaign that if they were voted into power, they would end manual scavenging and re-skill workers. However, when the BJP first became the ruling political party in India in 2014, its election manifesto also included a commitment to eliminate manual scavenging and a declaration that they would make India manual scavenging-free by 2023. This unfortunately has not happened. In a report analysing the track record of the BJP-led Union government on social justice for marginalised communities during the last 10 years, the authors highlighted that nearly a third of all country districts had yet to end manual scavenging.

Despite continued pressure from campaigners and organised movements, government reforms and criminalisation have not resulted in the needed change. Clearly making scavenging illegal and trying to reskill has not worked.

Working on a historical view of sanitation, disease control, and public health through our up-and-coming research and exhibition project ‘Typhoid, Cockles & Terrorism: How a Disease shaped Modern Dublin’ we have explored the successful and unsuccessful efforts of people working to improve health through water- and food-borne disease. What we have found is that historically the most vulnerable people are exposed to dangerous environments. Disease and death thrive on an inequality infrastructure and those that serve it.

Instead of trying to simply trying to abolish manual scavenging, which appears most desirable politically but not feasible practically, working with affected communities towards formalised and safe forms of employment should be the way forward.

The Typhoidland team are: Dr Samantha Vanderslott (Oxford), Dr Claas Kirchhelle (Inserm), Dr Carly Collier (UCD), and Dr Emily Webster (Durham) working with collaborators Dr Manjulika Vaz, Radhika Hegde, and Sakshi Saldanha (St John’s Research Institute, India).

To find out more about the Typhoidland project visit: www.typhoidland.org.

Our longer article about manual scavengers is ‘Between paternalism and illegality: a longitudinal analysis of the role and condition of manual scavengers in India’.

Our exhibition ‘Typhoid, Cockles & Terrorism: How a Disease shaped Modern Dublin’ opens on 16th June 2024.

Manual scavengers — the outlawed workforce keeping India’s sanitation system running was originally published in Oxford University on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘…without Heatley, no penicillin’ — Sir Henry Harris

Norman Heatley is often described as the unsung hero of the penicillin story. A recent PhD graduate with a genius for invention, he became a pivotal member of the Oxford team that developed the miracle drug in the early 1940s.

But while his colleagues at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology — Professor Howard Florey and Ernst Chain — were awarded the Nobel Prize for their efforts, for decades Norman’s contributions went unrecognised. His daughter Rose reflects on his incredible legacy, and explains how she plans to make her own mark on the future of human health by leaving a gift to the Dunn School in her will.

The great survivor

‘Penicillin was the height of my father’s career. He was very young — 30 years old,’ says Rose Heatley, Norman’s eldest daughter. She was born after the drug’s development and doesn’t recall him talking about it when she was growing up. ‘My awareness of the penicillin story and his work didn’t come until there were the anniversaries of the discovery. Daddy was always the one interviewed because all the other people involved had died, so he became the great survivor.’

Even then, she says, ‘he was so modest. He used to say: I’m not that special.’ Many would strongly disagree with that assessment, of course. In an interview with the BBC in 2010, medical historian and author Dr Eric Sidebottom described him as ‘the key technical man’ in the Oxford team. He devised a clever assay for measuring the activity of penicillin, established appropriate conditions under which it was stable, and pioneered a multi-stage technique to isolate and concentrate it.

Norman also designed the ceramic vessel used to grow the Penicillium notatum mould from which penicillin was extracted in the necessary quantities for clinical trials. ‘I’ve got one here,’ says Rose, taking it down from a shelf in her living room. Perched on top are two little vials, which read: 100,000 Oxford units, penicillin, sodium salt, store below 10 degrees centigrade. ‘I think maybe he kept his paperclips in them,’ she laughs.

Norman commissioned a company to make 1,000 of these vessels and by early 1941 the team felt as though they had enough penicillin to start treating humans. On 12 February that year, 43-year-old policeman Albert Alexander became the first patient to receive the drug. He was being cared for at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford and although his condition initially improved, supplies of the penicillin ran out before the cure could be completed. He succumbed to his infection shortly after.

The team then changed their approach to administering the drug and, following a series of treatment successes and publication of their findings, were able to secure its mass production in the US (Norman, who had travelled there with Howard Florey in 1941, stayed on for some time as an adviser in the research laboratories). Within just a few years penicillin was being used to treat Allied soldiers fighting in the Second World War, significantly reducing the number of deaths and amputations caused by infected wounds.

It’s estimated that over 500 million lives have now been saved by the drug.

A quintessential family man

Norman may have played a pivotal role in one of the greatest medical advances of the 20th century, but it was only in his later years that he began to receive wider recognition for the contribution he made. In 1990 he was awarded an extremely rare Honorary Doctorate of Medicine from Oxford University, and two decades later, a Blue Plaque was unveiled at his home of more than 60 years.

It was here, and in his role as a family man, that Rose remembers her father most fondly. He was exceptionally practical, she says, making over 20 bookcases for the house as well as a slide that fastened to the stairs, allowing her and her siblings to whizz down them onto a pile of cushions below. He was also ‘far from a gender stereotype’, doing all of the family’s washing, making curtains and lampshades, altering clothes and growing vegetables in the garden. And he was very kind, too, regularly offering lifts to people waiting at the bus stop as he and his family drove past in their car.

Before her father’s death in 2004, Rose helped to set up the Norman Heatley Lecture at the Dunn School in honour of his work there. The annual event gives members of the University the chance to hear from and meet some of the world’s top scientists. After Rose inherited some money from her godmother, she made a further gift towards their maintenance. ‘It just felt like a very worthy cause, bringing people together of international renown in the field of medical research, some of them Nobel Prize winners,’ she says.

Rose makes a point to attend every year, returning to the place she remembers visiting as a child: she and her father would have a sandwich lunch together every Friday in his lab, before he took her to ballet class in the afternoon. It was this personal connection that initially sparked an interest in leaving the Dunn School a gift in her will — a decision that was cemented by the incredible impact of the work taking place there now.

Despite enormous past research successes, the department has never rested on its laurels. Today, close to 300 scientists from more than 30 countries work collaboratively to uncover the molecular and cellular mechanisms that underpin human health and disease. Areas of focus include the identification of novel therapies and diagnostic strategies for cancer, and the development of vaccines for bacterial and viral pathogens.

Many challenges still to be solved

Rose didn’t follow in her father’s scientific footsteps. Instead she studied Chinese at SOAS in London before embarking on a career at the BBC, starting with the Chinese section of the World Service. Her interest in the country’s language and culture remains today, and she points to the Chinese Taoist emphasis on the importance of knowing what is ‘enough’ as a guide for her giving. ‘It’s over 2,000 years old,’ she says, ‘and a real prompt to donate.’

As the Dunn School approaches its centenary in 2027, donations of any size, including those left as gifts in wills, have a critical role to play. ‘Penicillin has saved millions of lives,’ says Rose, ‘but there are still many challenges to be solved. It’s money that could lead to new drugs and very necessary new drugs for all kinds of illnesses, which will benefit potentially millions of people — how can that not be good thing?’

Leaving a legacy to Oxford

Legacies provide an important source of funding for the University of Oxford, enabling it to continue to make vital breakthroughs in the 21st century. If you would like to discuss leaving a gift to Oxford in your will, please contact our legacies team at legacies@devoff.ox.ac.uk or on 01865 611520.

Further reading: Take a closer look at the international team of scientists and medics that came together in Oxford to develop penicillin, including the ‘penicillin girls’, pictured above.

Norman Heatley, the unassuming penicillin pioneer who changed the course of medicine was originally published in Oxford University on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Part five: strengthening democracy across Africa

Next in our series celebrating Oxford alumni and former scholarship holders who are helping to build a better world, we meet a master’s graduate whose passion for participatory democracy, good governance and human rights is driving positive change — both in his home country of Nigeria and beyond.

‘My vision is of an Africa better led, better served and better governed’ — Samson Itodo

Samson is a lawyer and the founder of Yiaga Africa, a non-profit organisation committed to the promotion of democratic governance. For nearly two decades he has worked to facilitate the inclusion of young people in politics and build electoral integrity across the African continent. In 2020, with support from a Standard Bank Africa Chairman’s Scholarship, Samson moved from his base in Abuja, Nigeria to Oxford, to study for a Master of Public Policy.

I’d always wanted to be a lawyer because I’ve always wanted to defend human rights. One of the major reasons I ventured into this field was the level of egregious human rights violations that I experienced in my society and community.

When I was an undergraduate student I was arrested and detained for no reason. The police said that my friend and I were loitering at a late hour, but it was just 11pm. While I was in the cell, I came into contact with other young people who were there for reasons they weren’t aware of. When I left detention I told myself that the struggle for political freedom was going to be the struggle of my life, because I didn’t want to see any other person go through what I went through for committing no offence.

I come from a continent with huge potential, which should be the leader of the world, but due to the failure of public leadership the continent and my country has not met its full potential. When political leaders emerge out of a flawed electoral process, accountability will always be sacrificed when they get into office.

I decided to work on sanitising the leadership recruitment process so that accountable and transparent leaders could emerge, leaders that care about human rights and take decisions that advance public interest. I also made a commitment to raise the next generation of leaders that will provide accountable and transformative public leadership, so that has been my trajectory over the last 16 years.

‘I was privileged to be recognised as a rising democracy leader by the National Democratic Institute, Goalkeeper by the Gates Foundation and young person of the year by several local and international organisations. That placed a huge responsibility on me to make democracy work and to lead on it in Africa’

— Samson Itodo

The median age of the population in Africa is 18 and yet the continent is led by gerontocrats. My team and I began advocating for a reduction of age limits for running for public office in Nigeria and in 2016 we launched the Not too Young to Run campaign, which was adopted by the UN, the African Union and the Economic Community of West Africa States. The law was passed in 2018 and shortly after we had about 20 young people under the age of 30 elected to office. This was a first in Nigeria’s electoral history.

It was only then that it hit me: it’s one thing to get into office but having the capacity for good governance is equally important. How could we get young people prepared to understand public leadership and public policy? I felt it was time for me to learn.

I chose Oxford because of the vision of the Blavatnik School: a world better led, better served and better governed. I just substituted one word and said: my vision is of an Africa that is better led, better served and better governed, and this is the place for me.

Studying for my master’s degree was a remarkable experience. All my life I’ve studied law and I was making a switch into a new discipline. I was confronted with economics, politics, evidence and statistics — it was fun just learning new things. It was also hectic and stressful, but, at the end of the day, what Oxford does is take you through this fire. It helps you to build and stretch yourself, and push yourself to become a better person. You never know your bandwidth until you go through that experience.

The Blavatnik School is the United Nations of Oxford. I say this jokingly: you don’t need to travel the world to know what happens in other places, you just need to be in Oxford and you’ll have an idea of global politics. It helped me to understand why Africa is experiencing the kind of challenges it grapples with and possible solutions to fixing Africa’s leadership and governance problems. It underscored certain foundational values Africa should prioritise in her quest for sustainable development.

I could write a book about the impact that my studies have had on my work. Firstly, my capacity for managing my organisation has greatly improved. One of the things I learned about leadership is that what you say is as important as how you say it, and this is something that’s crucial when you’re working within teams. Another thing I took from Oxford is how to use data and evidence-based research for public policy — this is now an important part of the work that we do and it has been so fascinating embedding this in the design of our programmes.

One of the things we did when I got back from Oxford was to challenge a policy introduced by our electoral commission on electoral technologies. The commission was going to use a particular device for accreditation of voters in the 2023 election but that accreditation was not going to be published online. We felt that, for the purposes of transparency, it was important that it was and so we evaluated the policy, wrote papers and had meetings with the commission about it. This led to them running a mock exercise where the accreditation was transmitted and published online — an approach that was then scaled for the national elections.

I established an election manipulation risk index for Nigeria ahead of the elections, which aggregates data from all of the states and clusters them into high, medium and low risk. It was designed based on my experience from Oxford and it looks at six variables with indicators just like the University’s COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. It showed that 27 out of the 36 states in the federation were at high risk of election manipulation.

I have also designed projects that are structured as randomised control trials, which was something I learnt how to do during my course. I recently ran an experiment to test the effectiveness of intra-group, peer-to-peer mobilisation in increasing the number of young people registered to vote. In the ten local governments where these actions took place, more people between the ages of 18 and 25 joined the voter register than elsewhere. The success of those interventions led to the UNDP awarding us a grant of over $500,000 to run the programme on a national scale. We ended up developing what we call the 60% of us project, which aimed to get 60% of young people to register and collect their voter card.

I couldn’t have made it to Oxford without my scholarship and the support of AfOx. I’m so humbled, delighted and grateful because they enabled me to pursue not just my academic and professional development, but my personal development too.

One of the things I say is that an investment in Samson Itodo means an investment in the present and future of Africa. I think that what Standard Bank, AfOx and Oxford have done is to help secure the future of Africa by investing in my education and the education of other scholars from the continent. And it’s a worthwhile venture because those that have received their support are now helping to transform their societies.

We’re at a time when the world is experiencing democratic recession and there is a need for renewed trust in democracy. My hope for the future is a democratic Africa where the people are at the centre of policies and at the centre of governance. But to make that happen there is a need for policy makers and the state to build constructive relationships with society, and that’s about trust — the one lesson we learned from COVID was that trust is the oil that makes public governance successful.

I also hope for a peaceful and prosperous Africa where leaders are making decisions mindful of the implications they will have on unborn children as well as those alive today. I pray that we will have public leaders who care for and love their community, because without love we can’t govern effectively. If we have leaders who put Africa first and put the people first, then the development challenges we’re dealing with will disappear. That’s the future of the continent that I see and I’m doing my best to help create it.

Discover the rest of the interview series:

• Part 1: Rebuilding Brazil’s environmental profile
• Part 2: Mitigating climate-related hazards in Nepal
• Part 3: A symphony of research, education and conservation
• Part 4: Empowering vulnerable communities in India and Bangladesh

Scholarships that are helping to change the world was originally published in Oxford University on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Part six: working to help the voiceless and the vulnerable

In this series, we continue to follow up with Oxford scholars who have gone on to create positive change in the world. Here we meet an Allan and Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust Scholar alumna who is using her skills to give voice to the voiceless — a thread that binds a career spanning art, journalism, policy-making and law.

Phyza Jameel completed her two-year master’s degree in international human rights law with the Department of Continuing Education while working in Iraq and, later, at the World Food Programme’s global headquarters in Rome. Her graduate course equipped her to look at what’s happening in the world through the lens of humanitarian and human rights law and to use it to make a difference to people’s lives.

In my family there was an obsession to send kids to engineering or medical school. I was the first one to study humanities and my family really didn’t like it. I did my first degree in visual arts in Lahore, Pakistan and my medium was film and TV. This got me into broadcast journalism and I started my career as a journalist at CNBC.

Within four years, I went from a junior reporter to Bureau Chief. I was reporting on issues relating to current affairs, politics, women and children, gender, safety and protection. This was during the Taliban era, and very soon after 9/11. It was day and night reporting and a high-intensity job. I had to resign from a senior position because of the way journalism in Pakistan at that time was practised — for me it was very unethical.

UNESCO were looking for somebody to lead a programme on freedom of expression and access to information and I took up the job. The next five years of my life were spent working on these two mandates. It might look a bit odd that I started in art school, became a journalist and then went to UNESCO as a development and policy strategist; however, the common thread is expression and communication, and being a voice for people who are unable to express themselves.

I started working for the World Food Programme (WFP) in Iraq in 2014, observing the accountability for the affected population. My role there was to set up systems and mechanisms that would allow people to contact aid-delivering organisations, lodge their complaints and ask questions to better understand their rights in a humanitarian setting. Then, in 2017, within one year of starting to study remotely at Oxford, I got the offer to work at the WFP’s global headquarters in Rome. Rather than a mandate for one country, this new role had a mandate that could be invoked globally in an emergency.

My current role is very exciting and challenging. I work as a humanitarian programme specialist in the area of communication and information. This means that when crises of conflict erupt, my role is to provide lifesaving communication and information such as connectivity on the phone as aid.

I had been saving money because I knew that I wanted to study internationally. When I applied to Oxford and got the Allan and Nesta Scholarship, that made such a day and night difference.

I did an MSc in International Human Rights Law, a two-year programme delivered both online and in person. In the first year, international criminal law was my main focus area. The late Robert Cryer was an amazing teacher and he inspired me to write an international criminal law case to prove the genocide of the Rohingya population in Cox’s Bazar. I was the first person to write a thesis exposing this. The next year my focus was international refugee law.

The scholarship has not only contributed to my pocket, but mentally, ethically and morally I think it brought me closer to my cause and purpose. I felt very strongly and still do about human rights.

Humanitarian organisations offer certain assistances that are life-saving, for example protection and safety, food, shelter, clean supply of water and access to healthcare. The World Food Programme is a humanitarian organisation working towards zero hunger and assisting people who are food insecure.

The WFP also offers communication as a form of aid, such as in wars and natural disasters, enabling people to contact help or family and friends. I started off working on access to emergency telecommunications — often in the most challenging environments. Then, three years ago, I took on an additional mandate, which was to pre-emptively prepare countries and governments for emergencies like natural disasters.

Information and communication is as crucial as food, water and shelter in a humanitarian setting.

Before going to Oxford I saw law as a very binary subject, but it’s a philosophical journey. There is no absolute right or wrong in a lot of things, and this world is full of dilemmas. I think initially I was very scared about this because I thought “there is a situation where one perspective has to be right and one has to be wrong in the lens of law”, and now I realise it doesn’t go like that. I also thought that perhaps law and justice should be agnostic to politics, but without understanding the politics, the culture and the context, we cannot treat the subject this way. Thirdly, I was happy to be challenging the way human rights are understood in Western societies versus in the eastern culture.

The most profound thing was that I was able to challenge my own perspective about politics, people, rights and about how rights are implemented. I was being challenged continuously in Oxford.

Just before I had to submit my first assignment at Oxford, my mother passed away. I was in Iraq at that time and was devastated. Of course, I couldn’t think straight and wrote to Dr Andrew Shacknove, Director of Legal Studies at the Department of Continuing Education at that time, saying: “I can’t do this”. An answer came back that was very interesting, and I still read that e-mail whenever I’m in a hard situation.

Dr Shacknove said that there are two ways to manage your grief. He said: “Some students find that carrying on with their studies is impossible, others find their studies an escape — each person is different.” His message helped me pick the second option, which helped me to make peace with my grief. I could also feel proud about doing something for myself and something that my mother would have been proud of too. I continued to study.

Oxford changed my perspective about my whole life, about the humanitarian and development sectors, and politics and people.

The whole experience around Oxford was just so profound, so amazing. I had really interesting classmates, some of whom are friends for life. Even now we have a WhatsApp group and, whenever I’m going to a country to work, I post a message to ask if there is anybody we know there. Often somebody will connect me to a lawyer or a humanitarian practitioner, so that network continues to build and flourish. That’s one of the lifelong experiences I have from Oxford.

From the very outset, even when I was a visual artist, my work has been about people whose voices are unheard. I think it’s just part of everything I do. I can alleviate their suffering either by advocating for it, solving it with tools and systems, providing assistance or aid, or, if nothing else, putting their voice on a platform where a number of people can at least acknowledge, empathise or understand the situation from their point of view.

I was born in a very safe environment but could easily have been born into an absolute nightmare.There are still kids being born right now in Yemen, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Syria, Palestine, CAR, DRC and Nigeria in the middle of war. I had an education and the cherry on the top is that I went to Oxford and that I could get a scholarship.

This all makes me an extremely privileged person and privilege comes with responsibility.

Discover the rest of the interview series:

• Part 1: Rebuilding Brazil’s environmental profile
• Part 2: Mitigating climate-related hazards in Nepal
• Part 3: A symphony of research, education and conservation
• Part 4: Empowering vulnerable communities in India and Bangladesh
• Part 5: Strengthening democracy across Africa

Scholarships that are helping to change the world was originally published in Oxford University on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How do we get to a fairer, more equitable world? Evie O’Brien, Director of the Atlantic Institute, describes how bringing together diverse leaders from across the world can make amazing inroads to some of the world’s most intractable shared problems.

Imagine what is possible when you bring incredible people together from across the world — people diverse in every measure — discipline, experience, culture, language, geography, but united in a single goal.

The Atlantic Fellows and Atlantic Institute exists to do that, identifying and bringing together an amazing group of leaders, all dedicated in their pursuit of equity

These Fellows working to address forms of inequity that exist in their communities, creating fairer, more equitable communities, whether racial equity, equity in health, reducing social and economic inequalities in different parts of the world, opening access to brain health. A more equitable society is one in which we have made progress on diseases like Alzheimer’s, made progress breaking barriers and inequalities between races, reduced health disparities and taken action on the social and economic conditions that divide us.

The Atlantic community is about imagining what is possible when you bring these incredible leaders together to connect deeply, to collaborate and to create new solutions, and in creating new solutions to make original mistakes.

James Joyce said that in the particular is contained the universal. There are so many leaders in the world who are responding to particular challenges on the ground, but whose solutions have universal applicability.

A community in Africa was characterised by vaccine hesitancy. The local solution was not about the science of the vaccine, but more about the believability, the connection to the community and the language of the people delivering the message. The way people responded was through the establishment of trust. It was universal because there were issues with hesitancy in entire countries. We could get Fellows together to share their local solutions and their mistakes.

And across our community we have Fellows coming together who would never have otherwise met or collaborated. In another case two Fellows came together in South America and completely changed how hospital beds were allocated.

We talk about (k)new solutions — things known in one community which can contribute to our understanding elsewhere. We are not reinventing the wheel but do realise that the answers to an issue may be known somewhere else.

So Indigenous peoples across the world, for thousands of years have been sustaining and maintaining complex ecosystems on this planet. In terms of the response to climate change there are some answers contained in that knowledge. The answers are known somewhere.

Our Fellows recently came together in person in Thailand. They have all completed a Fellowship programme that has a specific focus, whether that is brain health — Alzheimer’s, mental health equity, racial equity, social and economic equity etc.

The focus of their Fellowship programme has been very difficult. What they have in common are leadership attributes: a genuine curiosity to learn from others, the ability to listen and let go of their ego; a kindness and a genuine care for others; and grace. These might sound like soft words, but grace is the opposite of judgement.

No matter how diverse the judgement is, no matter how un-like-minded people are, when they share those core values of kindness, curiosity and grace, people are able to connect deeply and be more willing to learn from one another and come up with new solutions.

Although Covid-19 contributed to a return to nationalism, a return to their own back yard, there is an irony there because we have a level of planetary consciousness never known before. We are so aware of the big pressing problems in the world that require a global response.

That awareness gives us an opportunity to create lasting change. The first step is to support leaders on the front line of tackling inequality and bringing together these amazing people to understand what is known from the histories of our communities and create something new.

This article was originally published on the Rhodes Trust website in 2022.

What next?

Follow us here on Medium where we’ll be publishing more articles soon.

Want to read more? Try our articles on:

• Why Unlikeminded Leadership Is Crucial In Our Fractured World
• Scholarships that are helping to change the world
• What Latin America can teach us about tackling inequality

Are you a member of the University who wants to write for us on Medium? Get in touch with us here with your ideas: digicomms@admin.ox.ac.uk.

What does a fairer, more equal society look like? was originally published in Oxford University on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘At Oxford I could pause, think about my life, think about what I wanted to do in the future.’

Tope Folarin is an award-winning author and Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. See topefolarin.com for information about Tope’s writing. This is an edited transcript of a conversation with Tope as part of our series of conversations with Rhodes Scholar alumni.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m Executive Director at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think-tank based in Washington DC. We cover a range of issues including economic inequality, the environment, trade and mining and various foreign policy issues. I’m also writing my second novel and working as hard as I can on that. I teach fiction at Georgetown University — I love having conversations with serious creative writers at the undergraduate level and help them shape their work. And I sit on a bunch of boards so that’s also invigorating. I’m a parent to two kids, a five-year-old and a two-year-old, and I’m married to a very busy woman. So, life is very full!

The fiction and the policy studies, there’s presumably not a lot of cross-over between those.

When I was at Oxford, for the first time in quite some time, I had time to think about my life. My undergraduate life was so busy, I was doing some many things, so many clubs, I was worried about grades, I was travelling domestically and abroad. At Oxford I could pause, think about my life, think about what I wanted to do in the future. There’s this point that comes, I think for most Rhodes Scholars, where you confront the fact that the rest of your life won’t be hanging out on the river at Magdalen drinking nice beverages. At some point. you’ve got to make something of your life.

​When that moment arrived for me, I was deeply interested in public policy and didn’t want to let that go, but I was also beginning to recognise that art was incredibly important to me. Art had been important to me my entire life, but I’d shelved that because I thought it was distracting me from my academic life, that it would distract me from achieving my academic goals. And one of the great things about being at Oxford was that I recognised it was possible to have this really rich creative life as well and that wouldn’t at all detract from the things I was doing in other spaces. I decided I was going to try my best and excel in the policy world, but also do my best to become a great artist, I would spend my life pursuing both goals.

​I’m pleased that I’ve been able to carve a life for myself that includes a policy and politics focus, but also art as well. For me that’s incredibly important.

It’s been suggested that, in the past, the Rhodes Scholarship and Oxford undervalued the arts — did you find that?​

When I was at Oxford, if you were in the humanities like I was (I came in as political science major), there were a few tracks that you were meant to follow — you could go to law school, which I considered, you could go to a consulting firm, or perhaps you could pursue an academic career. There wasn’t a sense that the arts was a viable pathway. Why would you get a Rhodes Scholarship and then start from scratch somewhere else, or go into a field where the Rhodes credential doesn’t necessarily get you in the door?

I mean, it makes sense. You get a Rhodes Scholarship, you go to a McKinsey interview, they know what it is, they respect that. Same with law school, same with the academic route. If you’re trying to publish a short story and you say you’re a Rhodes Scholar, nobody cares. Or you try and get a film made, or try and get a play up on stage.

Once I decided, I’m going to do this, I’m going to give this a shot, I sought out artists who were Rhodes Scholars, like Kris Kristofferson — I remember reading about his life at Oxford. Terence Malick, who makes incredible films, I came to his work through another route, I didn’t know he was a Rhodes Scholar. John Edgar Wideman, who for me is an incredibly important writer, and I think he was the second black Rhodes Scholar after Alain Locke. Alain Locke, himself, who in many ways was the father of the Harlem Renaissance and really deeply ensconced in various arts movements of the early 20th Century. So I had to build a personal pantheon of Rhodes Scholar artists who had been successful before I had the courage to step on that path myself.

I think the arts are even more important now than they ever have been. They enable us to draw connections between ostensibly disparate topics, at a moment when people the world over need to learn how to work together to confront the challenges that are facing us, the multiple crises that are bearing down on us, the environmental crisis, the economic crisis, the crises in our democracies. The arts are not a back page thing for me, they are front and centre and teach us how relate to one another as human beings.

Having made the decision to pursue both goals, did your career trajectory work out as you expected?​

I think so. I hope the younger version of me would be happy with where I am now, keeping in mind I still have ambitions, and I’m still pushing ahead. I would say that when you get to Oxford and you enter Rhodes House and become part of the community, there’s a sense that this is the first rung on the ladder, and if I continue to work hard and make the right connections, it’s all upwards from here. I’ll keep moving forward. And I know, because I’ve read a bunch of bios of those who’ve walked these halls before me, where I could end up. That said, the arts don’t necessarily work like that, especially when you’re starting.

I remember reading about this great poet, Monica Youn — she’s a Rhodes Scholar as well — she went to law school and at a certain point decided she wanted to dedicate her life to poetry. She talked about her process of establishing herself in a new space, and for me, that happened when I left Oxford. I started working at Google when I left Oxford and after a year and a half at Google I heard a voice inside that said, “you have to start writing, you have to do it now”.

So I left Google and I came to the US in 2008, thinking I would work on my poems — at that point I was completely besotted with poetry. I thought I’d work on my poems for six months, get a couple published, then get another job. Then the financial crisis happened, so I didn’t work for a year and a half. I was completely dejected, despondent, I was deeply unhappy, especially because so many of my peers seemed to be advancing. I actually retreated from social media at that point in my life because any time I went on Facebook I’d see my friends gallivanting around the world, announcing they’d been made a partner somewhere, announcing their graduation from Yale or Harvard Law School. And I was poor, I was trying to write poems, nobody was publishing these poems, the future didn’t look very bright at that point.

But looking back, it was by far the most important point of my professional life, because it was a crisis and I tried to think about it as an opportunity, and I spent a lot of time just working on craft. I decided to spend four hours a day writing, four hours a day going to the museums here in DC and taking in as much art as I can, a couple of hours watching a film — I decided to dedicate myself to living as an artist. And I can say confidently if I didn’t do that for a year and a half, then I wouldn’t be successful now.

So I think that if you’re interested in making it as an artist, you have to separate yourself from the notion that it’s a straight ladder up; there will be various points that you have to step sideways and do other things.

What advice would you have for those applying for the Scholarship now?

If you’re in place when you can apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, you’ve done well in your undergraduate life, you have proven yourself to your peers and your professors, and you have your entire life in front of you. Now is the moment for thinking outside the box, because of everything that we’re facing, the choices we make now will determine the lives that our grandchildren and great grandchildren are able to live. We hold the power the ensure that they’re able to live healthy and sustainable lives. So now is the time to be courageous, now is not the time to say, “I’m going to do the conventional thing”, now’s the time to say, “what can I do to ensure that humanity is able to surmount these challenges that we’re facing?”

This article was originally published on the Rhodes Trust website in 2023.

What next?

Follow us here on Medium where we’ll be publishing more articles soon.

Want to read more? Try our articles on:

• Why Unlikeminded Leadership Is Crucial In Our Fractured World
• ‘One day it’s there, one day it’s not’
• Online events apply the humanities to today’s big questions

Are you a member of the University who wants to write for us on Medium? Get in touch with us here with your ideas: digicomms@admin.ox.ac.uk.

How the arts help us confront the world’s greatest crises was originally published in Oxford University on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It took a pandemic to scale up a technology for assessing people at a distance that was first reported in the psychiatric literature in 1957.

I began to write We Can Do Better: Urgent Innovations to Improve Mental Health Access and Care just prior to the onset of the pandemic. It was squeezed into weekends and evenings after full days at the hospital, seeing patients and training senior residents in psychiatry. Like most of my colleagues, I suddenly found myself working remotely, except for weekly shifts jabbing people at a vaccination clinic, seeing patients on video connections from my home to theirs — or sometimes to their cars, open fields, and other novel settings where they could maintain needed privacy. The world of mental health adapted rapidly to the necessary shift — a clinical imperative for patients and an economic imperative for providers — and suddenly we all learned that our traditional ways of doing things were not necessarily the best, or the most convenient for people in need.

It took a pandemic to scale up a technology for assessing people at a distance that was first reported in the psychiatric literature in 1957. But Covid did other things that accelerated innovation. It set a new world record for the development of vaccines, a process that traditionally had taken many years and instead was achieved in a matter of months. This has raised public and professional expectations around innovation. Finally, the pandemic placed a spotlight on the mental health sequelae of both the infection and the constraints it placed on our emotional, social, educational, and vocational lives. Contrary to initial fears and quick national surveys, the pandemic did not cause a tsunami of mental illness and suicide. Indeed, suicide rates cross-nationally declined during the pandemic. Sober scholarly analysis, rather than newspaper hyperbole, suggests rates of mental illness did not increase significantly.

But public awareness of mental health, which was growing prior to the pandemic, appears to have been further heightened — to the extent that improving mental health now often figures in the platforms of political parties of all stripes, something that was unimaginable two decades ago.

Prior to the pandemic, every health professional — as well as individuals struggling with mental illness and their families — knew that access to care was a problem, even in relatively highly resourced countries, and that treatments were good but not great, with no major paradigm-shifting advances. I am one of those health professionals. But I am also an optimist by nature, and one of the advantages of working in a teaching hospital of a university is the opportunity to learn about innovations that could make a difference.

All too often, the government response to unmet health need is to offer funding for more of the same — more of the traditional clinicians, more hospitals, more beds. There is a need to think differently about how services are provided and to consider new approaches, mindful of the need to gauge outcomes (a need that is often ignored with our existing approaches that have been sanctified as traditions).

In my book, I describe just some of the innovations happening now and awaiting scaling up; some have already been implemented and evaluated outside of Canada, while others have been created and tested within Canada. They include integrated services for youth that are community-based, accessible rapidly without appointment, and committed to outcome measurement; pharmacogenetics to help minimize the current trial-and-error approach to antidepressant selection; advances in the app world and artificial intelligence; rapid transcranial magnetic stimulation; and scientifically evaluated solutions to homelessness.

All of these are evidence-based contributions toward providing that essential component of all healthcare: hope.

This article was originally published on the Rhodes Trust website in 2023.

About the author

David Goldbloom, OC, MD, FRCPC (Nova Scotia & Exeter 1975) is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He recently retired from clinical practice at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, where he was inaugural Physician-in-Chief and subsequently Senior Medical Advisor. He is a former Chair of the Mental Health Commission of Canada and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. He co-authored How Can I Help? A Week in My Life as a Psychiatrist (2016) and more recently authored We Can Do Better: Urgent Innovations to Improve Mental Health Access and Care (2021).

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Want to read more? Try our articles on:

• Why Unlikeminded Leadership Is Crucial In Our Fractured World
• An asymmetric age divide?
• Virtual Presence: loneliness and technology

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Mental Health: the status quo is unacceptable was originally published in Oxford University on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.