Social Responsibility – A New Way of Looking at Supporting the Disadvantaged

Global Public Health Innovations (GPHI) is a corporation dedicated to conducting interventions based on social responsibility. At GPHI, this means our interventions are based on values that ensure social responsibility rather than assistance dependency. "Assistance dependency" essentially means that communities have given up on their own abilities and have stopped believing they can help themselves. Social responsibility, on the other hand, calls upon the responsibility that individuals, companies, corporations, agencies/organizations (e.g., CBO's and NGO's), governments, and foundations have towards society as a whole.

Assistance dependency is like a house built on an unstable foundation, it does not last! Rather it leads to short term impacts with few long term changes. Current literature points to the ineffectiveness of assistance dependency and calls for a new approach (Anderson 1999, Anderson and Woodrow 1998, Moyo 2009, Gill 2010). To this end, GPHI's initiatives are built on solid foundations. GPHI initially identifies existing capacities by recognizing that all humans, regardless of their plight, have capacities and that community ownership is required to sustain efforts. Ownership, however, is not a simple undertaking.

Through GPHI's 360° Village and Urban Innovations, we work with communities to ensure that support is relevant to the local population, is modified for local implementation based on needs, and is support that the local population is keen to implement. At GPHI, we:

• Bring experience and expertise from diverse countries and settings worldwide.
• Identify community capacities and encourage, support and validate their move to action.
• Offer communities a plethora of options for moving ahead in a myriad of fields to tackle the challenges they have identified as most pressing.
• Eliminate the possibility of donor dependency or aid/assistance dependency and ensure that the foundation for any support provided is solid from the beginning.
• Work WITH communities not simply in communities.
• Bring expertise in the form of trainings, capacity building, technical instructions, and side-by-side support.
• Document progress made and challenges encountered in order to continually improve and measure achievements.