Sherman Fairchild Foundation Funds Project
September 2025
Lisa Hirschhorn, MD, MPH, director, Ryan Family Center for Global Primary Care, and her team were awarded funding by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation for their project, "SHELTER Tea Champions: Supporting Health, Education & Livelihood: Towards Empowerment and Resilience (SHELTER): Empowering Children from Assam Tea Plantations." The project period runs from September 2025 to August 2026.
Poverty and limited access to education and good health care lead to long-term issues that repeat across generations in a vicious cycle. One of the largest problems is a lack of strong educational opportunities for the children on Assam tea plantations. This affects math and literacy skills, which in turn limits career pathways and causes poor health and nutritional status, and low levels of women’s empowerment. In response to this challenge, the Ryan Family Center for Global Primary Health Care launched the SHELTER Tea Champions program in May 2024 with their partners The Center for Development Initiatives (CDI) of the Missionary Sisters of Mary Help of Christians in Guwahati, Assam, India. This program is built on an existing collaboration between the CDI, the Havey Institute for Global Health, the School of Education and Social Policy at NU, and the Maternal and Child Health India program of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
