“We just clicked.” That is how Ben Tao, an entrepreneur, described his fall 2014 meeting with the Harvard Chan School’s Jennifer Leaning.
Born in Burma (also called Myanmar), Tao retains a keen interest in events there. When he met Leaning, the François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights and director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, they discussed, among other topics, the plight of the Rohingya refugees. The Rohingya, a minority Muslim group in Burma, are facing persecution there; many have fled to Bangladesh, where they live in refugee camps. As a result of that meeting, Tao contributed $50,000 toward the implementation of Leaning’s Rohingya Rapid Assessment Project. She traveled to Bangladesh in March 2015 to begin the first phase of the study.
Tao is a strong supporter of many of the School’s other human rights efforts as well. After meeting Theresa Betancourt, associate professor of child health and human rights and director of the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity, he contributed $50,000 to support her Mental Health Disparities in Refugee Children research project. And he contributed $500,000 to establish the endowed Tao Fund for Human Rights Research. Tao describes this gift as a vote of confidence in Leaning, Betancourt, Dean Julio Frenk, and other faculty he has encountered. “Everyone I’ve met at the School has been deeply inspiring and impressive,” says Tao. “Their dedication to their jobs is really priceless.”