Wilkinson ’75
Helping Communities,
Saving Children
Fresh out of college, Randa Wilkinson ’75
joined the Peace Corps, inspired by a
close family friend and physician who
had moved his family to Kabul, Afghan-
istan, to care for patients in an under-
served region.
From 1979 to 1981, Wilkinson was
assigned as a health care volunteer to
Maghama, Mauritania, in West Africa.
There, among other duties, she helped
establish a feeding center for malnour-
ished children and developed nutrition
and health education lessons for the
center’s caregivers.
“I knew that giving aspirin to babies
wasn’t the most effective way to combat
malnutrition,” says Wilkinson. “We started
a different way of treating these children
and working with caregivers, and we
realized they didn’t know much about
health and nutrition.”
Wilkinson returned to the States and
pursued her M.S. in international nutri-
tion from Tufts University’s Friedman
School of Nutrition Science and Policy.
She has continued to use her under-
standing of nutrition as a basis for much
of the work she’s done since that time.
Perhaps most notably, Wilkinson spent
four years, from 2003 to 2007, working
in the Jakarta, Indonesia, office of
Save the Children. Using the “Positive
Deviance” approach pioneered by her
Peace Corps director, Jerry Sternin,
Wilkinson has based her work on help-
ing communities identify successful
behaviors that already exist, instead of
depending on unsustainable outside
experts and resources.
“Positive Deviance is based on the fact
that, in any community with complex and
difficult problems, there are a few outliers
who have found different ways of coping,”
she explains. “Those behaviors can be
broken down and practiced by anyone. In
the context of nutrition, instead of feeding
a child twice a day, those who were poor
but had thriving children were feeding
them four times a day. And instead of just
rice, they were adding protein that was
cheap and available.”
Wilkinson employed a similar strategy
in response to the 2004 tsunami that over-
whelmed Indonesia. In designing nutrition
programs for the emergency response,
Wilkinson looked at those groups of dis-
placed people who were using their relief
aid in a more effective manner. Some
groups had self-organized their commu-
nities into preparing meals collectively
and had better outcomes than other
groups. Learning from these groups,
Wilkinson designed and implemented
community kitchens to target vulnerable
children and pregnant women.
In more recent years, Wilkinson has
served as a nutrition advisor for a USAID-
funded maternal and newborn health
program in Indonesia and as a nutrition
consultant for the World Bank in Haiti.
In 2009, she joined the Positive Deviance
Initiative at the Friedman School as
director of training. She was honored
in 2012 with the school’s Leah Horowitz
Humanitarian Award, recognizing her
“substantial commitment to forging rela-
tionships based on service in humanitar-
ian field work.” In her role at the Friedman
School, Wilkinson has written and helped
implement Positive Deviance initiatives
in the U.S. and abroad for prevention of
anemia in adolescent girls, high dropout
rates among middle school girls, truancy
and poor school performance, social isola-
tion among people with mental health
diagnoses, and the health outcomes of
older adults.
“The difference in many of these groups
is behavior,” she says. “And it’s all about
people listening to each other. My exper-
ience of coming to St. Paul’s represented
a new world in terms of interacting with
one another. That way of interacting with
everyone and giving everyone a voice was
the beginning of who I strive to be.”
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