Beyond Health Awards.
The presentation of the Beyond Health Awards will be a part of the Gala program. The school awards its highest honor, the Beyond Health Award to individuals who have made a lasting contribution to creating the conditions that make populations healthy so that all can live full lives. We award a Beyond Health Award to those who have made a contribution through creating new knowledge, through helping us learn about the causes of health in a new way, and who have made a difference through their work and lives. This year we have two outstanding Beyond Health Awardees.
Janice Cooper, Carter Center Mental Health lead for Liberia, is the Carter Center lead on mental health in Africa. As a result of her work, Liberia is on course to reach its goal of expanding access to mental health care to 70 percent of the population.
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Dr. Janice Cooper, Project Lead, Carter Center Liberia Mental Health Program Janice L. Cooper, Ph.D., Country Representative for Health and Project Lead for the Carter Center Liberia Mental Health Program, oversees the Mental Health Initiative, works with the Ministry of Health, organizes curriculum development, and manages evaluation efforts. A native Liberian and health services researcher, Dr. Cooper’s current project Supporting Psychosocial Health & Resilience, a Japanese Social Development Fund project is financed through The World Bank. Through this initiative, she and her colleagues in Liberia and Atlanta support expansion of service access and quality of care for persons with mental health conditions and epilepsy in conjunction with the Ministry of Health. The project is focused on two counties highly impact by Ebola. It also supports the training a new cadre of child and adolescent mental health specialists in Liberia.Dr. Cooper was training component lead and co-investigator for a recently ended Grand Challenges Canada grant under the auspices of Makerere University School of Public Health entitled, Mental Health Beyond Facilities (MHBeF), a multi-country initiative. In Liberia, MHBeF extended mental health services to the hard-to-reach counties of Sinoe, Rivergee and Grand Kru, using a comprehensive community care model. Dr. Cooper led Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty, as its interim director, and, was lead author and principal investigator (PI) on a number of publications and studies, including her most well-known, Unclaimed Children Revisited which she co-authored with her mentor, Jane Knitzer.At Columbia she was also Clinical Assistant Professor in Child Health, Policy and Management for the Mailman School of Public Health under Sherry Glied’s leadership. She won the Calderone Research Prize for Junior Faculty there. Since joining the Carter Center in 2010, with her colleagues in Liberia and Atlanta, she has lead the training of 166 mental health clinicians who now are in every county. She has been the principal investigator on studies ranging from assessing the accessibility of mental health drugs, to stigma, and a comparative study of mental health within community rehabilitation models. She is a founding member of Liberia Center for Outcomes Research in Mental Health, LiCORMH, an effort to foster empirical research-informed practices and policies.She has held numerous advisory board positions for professional organizations in the US and is currently a member of the Editorial Board for Interventions. She is a Commissioner for the upcoming Lancet Series on Mental Health and the lead on the upcoming paper on Empowerment of Persons with Mental Illness. In Liberia, she is a member of the Technical Coordinating Committee for Mental Health and a core member of the Disability Alliance. She is an adjunct associate professor at the University of Liberia and an instructor in Health Policy and Management at Emory University.In 2014, Dr. Cooper was seconded to the Liberian Ministry of Health to provide leadership for the planning, coordination and implementation of the mental health and psychosocial response to the Ebola crisis. She was the chair of the Mental Health and Psychosocial Committee for the Incident Management System’s for Ebola.She has authored or co-authored over 30 publications.Dr. Cooper earned a Ph.D. in Health Policy and a Masters in Public Administration (mid-career) from Harvard University, a Masters in Public Administration from Columbia University and a Bachelors degree in Policy Making and Public Administration from Essex University in Colchester, England. She completed a fellowship in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School under Dr. Allan Brandt.Janice is mother to Logosou and Kalydosos Kudayah and step-mother to Gifty, Kodjoe and Blandina Kudayah. She is the grandmother of Winston Dunkor.
Larry Kessler is the Founding Director of the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, an agency that has served more than half of all people diagnosed with AIDS in Massachusetts; educated generations about the disease; and secured progressive city, state, and federal AIDS policy.
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Mr. Larry Kessler, Founding Director, AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts
Larry Kessler is the Founding Director of the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, an agency that has served over half of all people diagnosed with AIDS in Massachusetts, educated generations about the disease, and secured progressive city, state, and federal AIDS policy.
Kessler was born in 1942 in Pittsburgh, PA. In his time, he has been an ironworker, a seminarian, and a community organizer. In 1960, after high school, he briefly studied for the priesthood before getting involved full-time in social activism through a wide variety of different causes.
Kessler founded and directed Project Appalachia, an anti-poverty program, from 1966-1968. The Meals on Wheels program he started in McKees Rock, Pennsylvania, still operates today. As co-founder and director of Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center from 1970-1973, he took an active role in the civil rights, anti-poverty, and anti-war movements. Kessler continued his activism at Boston’s Paulist Center from 1973-1979, where he expanded the Walk for Hunger into the year-round anti-hunger program, Project Bread. During Boston’s desegregation crisis in 1974, Kessler served as a bus monitor to help Boston kids get to school safely.
In l982, as a board member of The Fenway Community Health center, Larry met with a passionate group of advocates to respond to the growing AIDS epidemic that was only beginning to show itself in Boston. In January of 1983 they formed the AIDS Action Committee. By the summer of 1983, Larry was named the first employee of this newly formed organization and became the first executive director, serving until 2002. In 2002, when Larry stepped down as the executive director he stayed on as the founding director until 2007 when he retired.
In 2013 Larry returned to the front line of the AIDS Epidemic as the Director of The Boston Living Center. The BLC is one of Victory Programs 18 programs and serves 1,000 men and women with HIV. BLC features nutrition, case management, living skills and other support services. In 2015, Larry retired again and left the BLC and Victory Programs.
During his 30 years of experience, Larry served on the AIDS Task Forces of the Massachusetts Governor and the Mayor of Boston. In 1989 he was nominated by Senator Kennedy to the National Commission on AIDS and served until 1993. During his tenure at AIDS Action he was honored with two honorary doctorates at Simmons College and Salem State University.
AIDS Action continues to serve over 2,000 men and women with AIDS and employs 175 people in several community centers and housing programs in Eastern Massachusetts. It is estimated that AAC has served over 60% of those diagnosed with AIDS in Massachusetts.