Under Their Wings: Scaling Up Social Justice

The tale of a social scientist and a social entrepreneur is a tale that without anything else is one worthy of being told. Add the fact that these women of shared drive and purpose connected at the Heights, and you have a remarkable tale but one that is not unusual by BC standards since here there is a pull, a tide that sweeps people into the University and then pushes them out into the world to deliver on this providence.

Betancourt came to BC in 2017 as the inaugural Salem Professor in Global Practice at the Boston College School of Social Work (BCSSW), a position endowed by Navyn Salem ’94, H’12, the founder and CEO of Edesia Nutrition, along with her husband, Paul, a private equity financier. Resources provided by the professorship support Betancourt’s research. It was, says the school’s dean, Gautam Yadama, “a dynamic match.”

“Navyn’s all about improving lives, particularly for vulnerable children—and not only doing something for just one child or a few, but figuring out solutions at scale. That’s Navyn; that’s also Theresa Betancourt, and that’s the philosophy I have for the BC School of Social Work,” says the dean.

Meeting for the first time in Yadama’s office, the two women recognized kindred spirits. “I quickly learned that we like to hang out in similar places,” reminisced Salem at the April 2018 event celebrating the inauguration of the Salem Professorship. “There are not many people in the world who can advise me on how best to get from the airport in Sierra Leone to the capital of Freetown or which ferry service is best to take.” Sierra Leone is a focal point for each of them. Betancourt has worked with former child soldiers since the end of Sierra Leone’s civil war in 2002; Salem, whose company is working—successfully—toward ending malnutrition, travels to the country frequently.

Betancourt investigates the effects of trauma on children, developing programs to help them heal from seemingly incomprehensible, irresolvable horrors. “I reached a point,” she says, “where I needed to go beyond collecting data on traumatized children and figure out a way to create change.”

Since 2002, Betancourt has directed the Research Program on Children and Adversity (RPCA), which hosts a pioneering long-term study of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone. Over the country’s brutal 11-year civil war, as many as 20,000 boys and girls, with an average age of 10, were abducted and forced into armed groups. They were frequently raped, forced to use alcohol and drugs, subjected to hard labor and violence, and forced to commit atrocities against their own families and communities.

Betancourt and her team set out to understand what had happened to these children’s lives in the aftermath of war. Their research identified a constellation of mental health challenges that made it difficult for these young people to pursue an education or hold a job and compromised their personal relationships. The team developed a youth readiness program to address these challenges, helping them regulate their emotions and develop coping skills. “We can’t undo those horrific, violent events that occurred in the lives of young people. But we can do things about the post-conflict environment,” says Betancourt.

Navyn’s all about improving lives, particularly for vulnerable children—and not only doing something for just one child or a few, but figuring out solutions at scale.

Betancourt’s work in Sierra Leone has made an international impact. But its origins lie in a log cabin in the small Yupik community of Bethel, Alaska, deep in the tundra, where she grew up. “It’s not the Alaska you see in the tourist magazines, with big mountains and trees; it’s really isolated in the permafrost, no plumbing, no paved roads,” she explains. Her father had worked in Ethiopia during the early years of the Peace Corps. “He came back to Ohio and didn’t think teaching there sounded as exciting as making a difference and continuing that sort of social justice mission. So he was the science teacher, the math teacher, and the fire chief in Bethel,” she recalls. Her mother led an early infant learning program, flying to remote villages to work with families, many of whom were affected by fetal alcohol syndrome. “During my childhood, Bethel topped per capita rates of violence in the United States because of the toxic mix of alcohol, guns, and all the social problems you can imagine when people lose their culture and sense of grounding,” says Betancourt. It was, she says, the genesis of her desire to help communities that lacked resources and were under threat.

Betancourt explains that across cultures, concepts of emotions, illness, the self, and the body differ so significantly that definitions of normal and abnormal behavior are quite different. “A lot of times, we’ll see the assumption that Western tools and Western measures just need to be translated and foisted on a new setting. But I know from growing up in Bethel that that’s exactly the wrong approach to take.”

While Betancourt was learning to ride a snowmobile and speak the indigenous Yupik language, the young Salem was absorbing her mother’s Quaker faith and activism along with her immigrant father’s Muslim Indian heritage and stories of the Tanzanian village where he grew up. “My dad taught me about the real world, one without access to basic necessities like food, water, and health care; my mom taught me to stand up for what you believe in,” Salem recalls. “If you see social injustice, get up and do something about it. March, protest, speak up, take action, get arrested for your cause, whatever it takes. My mom would have us making anti-war posters with our Crayola marker sets when we were six years old, then throw us in a red wagon and off to the peace rally we would go.”

As a senior at BC, Salem found a new something to get up and do. Her roommates talked her into joining the Appalachia Volunteers Program. Initially bemused by the idea of spending spring break in West Virginia building houses with Habitat for Humanity (“I thought, why not Mexico or Fort Lauderdale?”), she was surprised to find she loved it. “It was freezing cold, we worked hard all day and slept in really uncomfortable bunk beds, and we had the best time of our lives. The feeling of collaboration in the collective mission to help others was so powerful. It never left me. Still to this day, I prefer to be working on behalf of those most vulnerable in uncomfortable places.”

That powerful experience primed her for her first trip to Tanzania. Salem’s father had grown up in Dar es Salaam, where his family had emigrated from India in the late 1800s. Soon after Salem’s graduation from BC, he took her and her brother to see his homeland. “I remember visiting the Muhimbili National Hospital in Dar es Salaam,” she recalls. “And there, I witnessed something that has never left me. It was the sound of a mother’s crying. I listened to her scream in anguish upon learning that her child had died. I had wandered into this unknown land, completely unarmed and unprepared. I didn’t have any answers. I knew then that my job was to learn, train, and get ready for battle, to come back armed with solutions that would spread hope and that could change the world.”

She was determined to do something. But she wasn’t sure what. “My mind was spinning with so many ideas I couldn’t see straight.”

At last, she found her inspiration—though she had to fight for it. She wanted to visit a factory she’d read about, to the confusion of the nonprofit agency organizing the trip, which primarily took foreign visitors to schools, clinics, and the like. “They were all noble endeavors based on the all-too-familiar model of raising money and then providing aid,” explains Salem. Finally, she convinced the agency to let her tour the factory—and there it was, she says: “the most brilliant business model I had ever seen.”

“First, there was a line out the door; people were waiting for jobs. On the factory floor, I saw 3,000 women earning paychecks which would pay for shelter, medicine, food, education, and more for their families. I began to understand how important job creation was as a tool to tackle poverty.

“But there was more. They were making mosquito nets. So not only was this company contributing to economic development, but they were also creating a product that happened to solve a major global health problem—malaria. Wildly impressed, I thought, ‘what if I used these same principles and applied them to malnutrition?’”

Salem had already learned that malnutrition was killing five million children under the age of five every year—more than AIDS, TB, and malaria combined. “Even more shocking than this horrifying statistic is that these deaths are completely preventable,” says Salem, “100 percent preventable. These children simply need food and nutrition, a basic human right, needed by every child on planet Earth.”

Just two years later, Salem founded Edesia Nutrition with the mission to treat and prevent malnutrition in the world’s most vulnerable populations. She partnered with a French company, Nutriset, which had developed a concentrated, easily digestible, protein-rich, shelf-stable supplement they called Plumpy’Nut. She established a factory in the state where she and Paul are raising their daughters, Rhode Island, which had the third-highest unemployment rate in the U.S. at the time.

Edesia has been saving lives for a decade now— nourishing more than nine million children to date in more than 50 countries. Betancourt points out the synergy between Edesia and her own work with youth facing extreme adversity. “Navyn’s delivering a fundamental component of children’s basic security needs and human rights. Child development is not a hierarchy. Children need to be safe from violence, they need food, shelter, and medical care; they need education and economic security; and they need a loving attachment figure. These elements are interdependent and interrelated. That’s why the Salem professorship was such an honor, to have someone who’s also worked on these topics support my work.”

Salem says she hadn’t anticipated “how much overlap there really was between the work we do at Edesia and Theresa’s RCPA. I am really thrilled about the partnership she has forged with the government of Rwanda and other collaborators such as the World Bank USAID to promote early childhood development.” Funded by a grant from the LEGO Foundation, this partnership will scale up Betancourt’s work on early childhood development and violence prevention in the poorest of poor Rwandan households. “It’s this sort of impact that we are all striving for in our work,” she adds.

Betancourt says BC is exactly the right place for her research; it’s no surprise that BC brought her together with Salem. “I really appreciate BC’s commitment to advancing the lives of the most vulnerable, the most stricken by poverty, war, crises of migration. That social justice orientation is very much the Jesuit ethos, and it’s what attracted me to the University,” she says. “Navyn, too, is morally oriented towards making an impact.”

Salem is looking forward to working more closely with Betancourt. “It’s been an amazing journey together,” she says. Thanks to their synergy harnessed through Boston College, the lives of innumerable children across the world will be the better for it.