Ophelia Dahl named to TIME100

Boston, MA - Today TIME named Partners In Health Co-founder Ophelia Dahl to the 2024 TIME100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.  

Read the tribute by bestselling author and PIH board member John Green.  

"It’s an honor to be recognized alongside so many singular artists and leaders. I am proud and grateful to share our work at Partners In Health to deliver high quality health care to the poor—and, above all, to share it with the thousands of colleagues and friends at Partners In Health whose abiding commitment is a powerful antidote to despair. In Haiti and Rwanda, across the U.S. and around the world—PIH’s community health workers and teams accompany patients and communities as we build and rebuild health systems and seek to address the root causes of poverty and disease."    

Dahl’s work in global health began in 1983 in Haiti, where she went, aged 18, to volunteer at a school for children with disabilities. There she met the late Dr. Paul Farmer, and together with Haitian colleagues they began the work that led to the founding of Partners In Health in 1987 and the decades of growth that followed: PIH now serves millions of patients in 11 countries on four continents. PIH’s community-based model has helped to redefine what’s possible in health care delivery in settings of poverty, proving that HIV, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, and other diseases that stalk the poor can be effectively treated in rural and urban communities across the globe.  

Ophelia Dahl co-founded Partners In Health, a global health non-profit dedicated to delivering high-quality care to the poor. PIH’s history, from its origins in Haiti’s rural Central Plateau, where Dahl met PIH co-founder Paul Farmer over thirty years ago, through its expansion to ten countries on four continents and a global movement for the human right to health, was captured in the feature-length documentary “Bending the Arc.” Dahl led PIH as Executive Director for 16 years, and now chairs its Board of Directors. She continues to write, teach, and speak about the health and rights of the poor, moral imagination, and accompaniment. 

Dahl is a Trustee of Wellesley College, her alma mater, and a member of the Boards of Directors of the University of Global Health Equity, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the Clinton Health Access Initiative. She is on the Board of Silkroad and the Advisory Board of the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dahl is a recipient of the Radcliffe Medal, Union Theological Seminary’s Union Medal, and, together with her PIH colleagues, the Hilton Humanitarian prize. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her family. 

To read more about PIH Co-founder Ophelia Dahl, visit https://www.pih.org/ophelia-dahl.   

To read the full list of TIME’s 100 most influential people, visit https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people-2024/.