Harsh Mander

Harsh Mander, human rights and peace worker, writer, columnist, researcher and teacher is Chairperson, Centre for Equity Studies, devoted to the analysis and development of public policy and law for justice and rights of disadvantaged groups.
To counter rising hate violence and lynching, he leads the national initiative called the Karwan e Mohabbat www.karwanemohabbat.in or Caravan of Love, for atonement, solidarity, healing, conscience and justice.

He is a PhD from Vrije University in Amsterdam. His thesis was titled Vulnerable People and Policy Development in India: Designing State Interventions for Hunger, Homelessness, Destitution and Targeted Violence.
He is visiting faculty in the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany and Vrije University, Amsterdam, Holland.

A prolific writer, his 30 books include: ‘Under Grey Smoggy Skies: Living Homeless on the Streets of India’s Cities’; ‘A Matter of Life and Death: The Unfinished Journey to Secure Healthcare for All’; ‘Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India’; ‘Burning Pyres, Mass Graves and a State That Failed Its People: India’s Covid Tragedy’; ‘Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India’; and ‘Ash in the Belly: India’s Unfinished Battle against Hunger’.
As Member of the Indian Prime Minister’s National Advisory Council from June 2010-12, he helped draft many social rights legislations including the National Food Security Bill.

He was Special Commissioner to the Supreme Court of India in the Right to Food case for twelve years from 2005-17, during which time he investigated starvation deaths, and reviewed implementation and directed public policy reform for advancing the right to food and nutrition in several states in India.
He was a Richard von Weizsacker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy, Berlin in 2021-22. He was member and chairperson of the Advisory Board of Human Rights Initiative of Open Societies Foundation from 2018-21. He was also Council Member of Progressive International.

He helped initiate a number of initiatives for homeless people, including street medicine and recovery shelters in many cities and over 60 residential schools for homeless children.

He has made many significant interventions in India’s highest courts. For instance:
his petition to decriminalize beggary was allowed, which ended begging as a crime after nearly a hundred years. His petition in the Supreme Court resulted in the reopening for investigation of over 2000 criminal cases related to the Gujarat carnage of 2002 which had been closed without trial. A series of his interventions in the Supreme Court as Commissioner led to orders making homeless shelters a legal duty for all state governments. He petitioned against the detention of undocumented people deemed to be ‘foreigners’ in jails in inhuman conditions in Assam for nearly a decade; he petitioned for food and livelihood security of migrants during the covid pandemic.

The Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg awarded him their inaugural Human Rights Award 2022. The Peace Research Institute Oslo has included him in its 2022 shortlist of people recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize
He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of York in 2024.

James J. O’Connell, MD – President, Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Dr. O’Connell graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1970 and received his master’s degree in theology from Cambridge University in 1972. After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1982, he completed a residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). In 1985, Dr. O’Connell began fulltime clinical work with homeless individuals as the founding physician of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, which now serves over 10,000 homeless individuals and families each year in two hospital-based clinics (Boston Medical Center and MGH) and in 30 shelters and outreach sites, and on the streets of Boston. With his colleagues, Dr. O’Connell established the nation’s first medical respite program for homeless persons in September 1985, with 25 beds in the Lemuel Shattuck Shelter. This innovative program now provides acute and sub-acute, pre- and post-operative, and palliative and end-of-life care in the freestanding 104-bed Barbara McInnis House. Working with the MGH Laboratory of Computer Science, Dr. O’Connell designed and implemented the nation’s first computerized medical record for a homeless program in 1995.

From 1989 until 1996, Dr. O’Connell served as the National Program Director of the Homeless Families Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Dr. O’Connell is the editor of The Health Care of Homeless Persons: A Manual of Communicable Diseases and Common Problems in Shelters and on the Streets. His articles have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Circulation, the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, and several other medical journals.

Dr. O’Connell has been featured on ABC’s Nightline, CBS Evening News and in several feature-length documentaries including Give Me a Shot of Anything and The Antidote. He has received numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award in 2012 and The Trustees’ Medal at the bicentennial celebration of MGH in 2011. Dr. O’Connell has collaborated with homeless programs in many cities in the USA and across the globe, including Los Angeles, London, and Sydney. Dr. O’Connell’s book Stories from the Shadows: Reflections of a Street Doctor was published in 2015 in celebration of BHCHP’s 30th anniversary. In 2023, Dr. O’Connell work was chronicled by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Tracy Kidder in Rough Sleepers, Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People. Dr. O’Connell is president of BHCHP and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Jim Withers

In 1992, teaching physician Dr. Jim Withers dressed as a homeless person and joined a formerly homeless man to visit the street dwellers of Pittsburgh, making “house calls” at night. This initiative led to the program, Operation Safety Net (OSN) that brings medical care and social services directly to the unsheltered homeless. It also serves as a pioneering “classroom of the streets” for students of various disciplines to learn the principles of reality-based care. Over 80 medical schools now have associated street medicine programs.

In 2005, Dr. Withers established the annual International Street Medicine Symposium to foster collaboration in the care of those sleeping on the streets. There are now collaborating organizations on every continent. In 2009, Dr. Withers and others created the non-profit Street Medicine Institute to promote the global practice of street medicine. Dr. Withers also created the first Street Medicine Fellowship in 2019 at the UPMC Mercy Hospital of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Withers is in practice with the Pittsburgh Mercy health system, on the Internal Medicine teaching faculty of UPMC Mercy Hospital and an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.

Moderator: Kaitlin Schwan, Phd

Kaitlin Schwan is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Southern California and Director of the California Street Medicine Collaborative. Schwan holds an appointment as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work and is a Senior Researcher at the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness. A co-founder and Research Advisor for the Women’s National Housing & Homelessness Network, Schwan previously served as Senior Researcher for the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing. Her work focuses on bridging research, advocacy, policy, and lived expertise to advance housing justice.