Lectures

Victoria Hale worked with One World Health and Medicine360. They take on medical issues that aren't profitable but are necessary, like working on Diarrhea and Visceral Leishmaniasis.

She had a good story about how even small nonprofits can cure diseases. Most of the big lessons were ones that I had gotten from past speakers, though.

David Green was quite a character. He makes low cost medical supplies so that people in the third world can get quality healthcare. He started out with intraocular lenses to cure blindness (mostly from cataracts), but since then, he has branched out.

Four different organizations that started at Stanford came to talk. This talk seemed a little bit rushed and abbreviated. The organizations seemed cool, but I don't feel like I got to know a lot about the people's stories.

One organization made low cost ventilators.

SEE College Prep helps low income students and minorities study for the SATs.

TransFair USA is the main organization that does fair trade certification in the US. Seeing the person who started fair trade made me feel star-struck. Seeing Paul Rice in the flesh made it seem much more possible to do something as cool as create fair trade.

The Benetech speaker started out making open source software for international journalists and human rights organizations to use. Then, he started working on helping blind people read books. I think that he started out with text recognition and text to speech software. 

Kickstart makes cheap hip-operated pumps so that poor people can irrigate their land, which increases their income by a lot.

Big Tent provides group tools for nonprofits.

Priya talked about her international travels. She saw that women often want to live in small villages rather than moving to big cities. This prevents them from easily selling their goods, but they could still be productive, and this is important because when a woman earns 4 dollars per day, it has a greater impact on the community as a whole than any other allocation of resources.

There were also a bunch of events through the HAAS Center for Public Service.  On April 18-19, they had an Emerging leaders retreat.  I didn’t get much out of it.  It was at the beach, which was nice, but the only content at the retreat was a set of activities designed to make us think about what public service means to us.  Since I had already given a lot of thought to that topic, it was pretty much just a day at the beach when I should have been writing an essay (I ended up really proud of the essay, though – it was the one on Marx, Mill, and Remix that I wrote for SLE and talked about in

April 13, the law school brought Supreme Court Justice Breyer on campus.  It was just a small gathering in one of the law school buildings; it wasn’t like when Justice Kennedy came and talked to several thousand people.  That makes two Supreme Court Justices that I’ve seen.

I was unimpressed.  Aside from the horrible acoustics, there wasn’t much content in his talk.