Beyond Borders

Good ideas have no borders. 

Yet, a 2023 survey by Candid found that 66 percent of US funders’ grantmaking is not informed or inspired by global ideas.

Around the world—from Australia to Rwanda, from Bogota to New Zealand, and from Sweden to South Africa—countries have made progress tackling the same kind of problems the United States and other nations struggle with, ranging from maternal health to structural racism. This raises critical questions: What are they learning there that might inform work in our own communities? What can other countries and cultures teach us about how to frame, value, and address issues that impact our health?

Beyond Borders is a series sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as part of its efforts to learn with communities around the world to advance health equity in the United States. Contributors will share promising solutions, and, importantly, lift up perspectives and voices from countries and cultures whose stories have largely gone untold in a knowledge system biased to Westernized interpretations in health and science. Changing a system requires changing the relationship among its parts. Global learning expands the contexts we learn from and, as a result, changes how we produce knowledge. 

We hope that readers will come away from this series with a deeper appreciation of what the world has to offer and both inspiration and ideas they can apply to their own spaces to advance health equity. 

^{The views expressed by the authors are not necessarily the views of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.}