News at HSPHThe first decade of the 21st century one day will be viewed as “the decade of fear,” HSPH’s Leonard Marcus and Barry Dorn write in a May 11, 2011, Washington Post opinion piece. A video accompanies the article.
Marcus, lecturer on public health practice, and Dorn, adjunct lecturer on health policy and management, describe the unique role of Harvard’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, a joint program of HSPH and the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), that is co-directed by Marcus and HKS’s David Gergen. The NPLI has trained more than 350 emergency preparedness leaders through NPLI’s executive education program. Established in 2004, the NPLI helps ensure that public officials are prepared to meet the challenges of terrorist events, natural disasters, and disease outbreaks through training and research that reaches across lines of government jurisdiction and into the private sector.
“…The first, overarching lesson from our research is that bad leadership – much like smoking – is a public health risk factor,” they write. “Whether in the aftermath of a terror attack or a natural disaster, we have seen that when leaders don’t perform well lives are lost and people abandoned.” Leadership must not just come from government, say the authors. “The leadership needed must come from each and every one of us, leaders in our own right, willing to step up, reach out and link together,” Marcus and Dorn write. “This is our national strength and national resilience, a leadership lesson that we should embrace for the next decade in this story.”
Read the entire Washington Post article
View the Washington Post video
Learn more
“Crises Responders Seek to Bridge Gaps in Emergency Response” (HSPH web feature)
“The Eye of the Storm” (Harvard Public Health Review feature: Winter 2006)
