Ms. Bush came to campus to make contact with young people who are, technically, no longer her peers. Her organization, the non-profit Global Health Corp, recruits young professionals younger than the age of thirty, and Ms. Bush has recently attained the milestone of three decades. She pointed this age limitation out when she expressed desire to be a fellow in the foreign or domestic field rather than a social entrepreneur in headquarters, constantly fundraising and planning. Again, Ms. Bush came to engage the young, those she came to inspire. Instead of wearing professional attire, the power suits worn by the administrators who sat with her in the reserved front row, she dressed in an effortless ensemble of a light cardigan, a handwoven off-white skirt and knee high brown boots. Most of the female students wore knee high boots too, making this a successful audience adaptation. Speaking about audience adaptation, at supper she learned that the pre-med student who was ready to introduce her played on the GVSU basketball team, facts she shared when thanking him for the introduction.
There's a insouciance that works well for Ms. Bush, but this cannot be criticized as nonchalance or flippancy. She had ready many freighted statistics, including the number of women who die in childbirth or the percent of people with AIDS in an African village served by fellows of the Global Health Corporation, a stunning 25 percent. She had the statistics at her command but she came to deliver a message of hope and possibility, so she dismissed her stats as soon as she had delivered them. She moved on to anecdotes of Global Health Corp's founding working group and her first cadres of fellows in the field, people she loved to talk about. Since she came to inform the elders and move the young, she had numerous non-verbal ticks, which all young speakers have, thus becoming winning and engaging. The advice of keeping ones boots on the ground and pointing forward was ignored. Ms. Bush's speech coaches probably decided it was unwise to root out the boot scooting. It worked. Ms. Bush has long, beautiful hair, and she arranged it into six or seven completely different arrangements as she spoke. Again, I am sure this increased the attention of the mostly female audience. She often addressed her audience as y'all, with a genuine Texas twang we all enjoyed.
Again, she didn't barrage with statistics, but she had stories woven around them. In one African city, two fellows deployed a program that lead to seven thousand babies being born AIDS free to seven thousand AIDS infected mothers. This program has been picked up by the sponsoring nation for border to border dissemination. This led to the point that made all the students pickup their ears. It is not necessary to have a medical degree to be effective in Global Health. She could have signed up every undergraduate in the audience when that message arrived home. Many health problems in the world can be solved by communication, project management and problem solving. One of her fellows is an engineer bringing GAP clothing supply chain know how to distributing medicine to clinics in a third world country.
Question and answer gathered strength, with Ms. Bush complimenting students on their questions. She beamed as one male studently cautiously read his hand written question to her. I think the question on Obama care got an indirect answer, but it's clear that Global Health Corporation is a partner in the Obama's campaign against AIDS. For a speech by a Republican president's daughter, the discourse was delightfully non-partisan.
Ms. Bush envisions growing her corporation to 500 fellows. I think that's possible under her leadership, reaching out on college campuses and applying for non-partisan funding
No comments:
Post a Comment