In much of the social sector, the dichotomy between those served and those serving still influences the way we work. We may talk about global health, but when we say global, I've found we usually mean low-resource countries. This line of thinking, with its colonial roots, only reinforces often false dichotomies between donor and recipient countries and communities.

One of the unintended benefits of the pandemic was accelerating an understanding of what we have long known: We need to redefine “global” and recognize and connect local expertise. Communities across the globe have a lot to teach each other, and the onset of a global pandemic has made this abundantly clear as the countries with the strongest containment and prevention responses for Covid-19 are not always donor countries.

So when a local public health agency in Washington state was looking for partners with expertise in vaccine delivery, we raised our hand to help. We had people on our team in Seattle with deep expertise in vaccination programs — built through their work in Africa — during a time when the logistics and planning of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout were extremely unknown. It is almost hard to remember what it was like in December 2020, but it was all hands on deck. Our intent was to take advantage of what we knew about how to run vaccine logistics in Africa to help Washington state reach its vaccine equity goals locally, while also learning important details about early Covid-19 vaccine rollouts to infuse that information globally.

For us, this is how the virtuous cycle came to be.

Activating the virtuous cycle taught me important lessons that my organization will apply to our future work beyond the pandemic. Here are three learnings that highlight the value of bi-directional learning and how it can help your organization increase its impact.

  1. Identify the shared problem.
  2. Create opportunities for knowledge transfer.
  3.  Keep an eye toward the future.

Read the full article about global learning by Emily Bancroft at Forbes.