Long-time Hope Through Health supporters and monthly recurring donors through the Stand With Us Campaign, Casey and Jessica Whitsett, were recently asked why they have chosen to support Hope Through Health. Here is their response: Why have you chosen to give regularly to Hope Through Health?
We’ve known Kevin Fiori, one of the founders of Hope Through Health, since college and even before, so it would be impossible to deny the personal connection that was the initial impetus to start donating. When Kevin returned from the Peace Corp, he shared his experience in Togo and also the simple idea, if not impossible to execute, of providing effective AIDS prevention and treatment to those who could least afford or manage it in the communities he had come to love. We’re not ashamed to say that we had been well primed by reading about Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti (if you have not read Mountains Beyond Mountains it needs to be your next book) to immediately empathize with Kevin’s vision and jump at the opportunity to do what we could. Giving was a no-brainer, and we hope that as you learn about HTH’s mission that giving will seem as obvious to you too.
What are your hopes for Hope Through Health’s future? Frankly, we’d love to see Hope Through Health so successful that they become completely unnecessary. We believe that healthcare is a human right on par with education and civil liberties that shouldn’t be doled out, explicitly or implicitly, based on the random luck of the skin you walk around in or the community that you are born into. We believe that where luck has privileged us with the opportunity and the means to push our planet in that direction it is not only our responsibility but also our privilege to do so. Okay, okay, stepping down from the soapbox, we also recognize that we are a long way off from achieving the kind of global equanimity that would make HTH unnecessary, so for now we’d settle for them realizing wild success through an overflow of generosity. And by wild success we mean that we’d love to see them expand service to even one more person with your help. Speaking of which, we may have just talked ourselves into a larger donation. Shoot. Go HTH!
Take care, Casey and Jessica Whitsett 