About Us

Our Goals

To promote a One Health approach for community involvement in all areas of health among various disciplines in professional and graduate-level students.

To enhance skills in leadership and communication among graduate and professional- level students in a multidisciplinary setting.

The Summit

One Health, in the most recent iteration of its definition, is:

“...an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems.

It recognizes the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and inter-dependent.

The approach mobilizes multiple sectors, disciplines and communities at varying levels of society to work together to foster well-being and tackle threats to health and ecosystems, while addressing the collective need for clean water, energy and air, safe and nutritious food, taking action on climate change, and contributing to sustainable development.”

With persistent health threats such as pandemics (e.g. COVID-19), climate change (e.g. drowning seashore communities from rising sea levels), mental illness (e.g. the increasing presence of loneliness and depression), antimicrobial resistance (expected to cost 10 million lives by 2050), and wildlife trafficking (e.g. the complicated issue of pangolin poaching in Asia); there is a considerable need to approach complicated health issues through a One Health lens.

A leadership summit which brings together participants from various health disciplines (medical, veterinary, public health, environmental, etc.), will help foster growth in and between the health leaders of tomorrow. A planned 2 day, in-person One Health leadership summit will allow students to better develop their soft skills that are so desperately needed in the next era of health leaders, and will also challenge them to connect their discipline to others.

This summit is built on a pre-existing leadership development framework (inspired by HOBY Leadership conferences), and land on a community level call to action. Participants go through a progression-by-scale development process, which begins with introspection, merges what they learn in those sessions with team-based initiatives (where they will learn crucial skills such as leadership style flexing, conflict mediation, cultural humility, etc.), and then finally applies it to their communities and disciplines. Perhaps more importantly, we hope to inspire participants to always look around them in the future to recruit new positions and roles, so that more room can be had at the table for all health disciplines and concerned parties.