Warning - Mountains Beyond Mountains may make you want to become a doctor, work harder than you already do for social change, or travel to Haiti, Peru and/or Russia. Written by the Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder, the book chronicles the life and impact of famed social entrepreneur Dr. Paul Farmer and his organization, Partners in Health. Their model is to partner with poor communities to combat both disease and poverty.

My two Coro interns gave me the book, upon being shocked that I hadn’t already read it. Having just come out of a particularly intense reading period for the Echoing Green selection process (translation: around 1,000 pages of applications), I wasn’t in the mood to read. But, as you probably guessed, I couldn’t put it down. Why? There are important themes in the book that can help all of us who believe strongly in focusing our efforts for the greater good (on a systems level):

1) Dr. Farmer’s model for public health seems to have been built from a deep love for the people he was serving. He also seems to have spent more time on the ground (in the slums, prisons, hospitals) as he was developing solutions, than in university. It was not good enough to heal one person, but to ensure that all those affected by disease had access to care.

2) Ideas, institutions and very well-intentioned people often leave out the very, very poor. Dr. Farmer dedicated himself to Haiti first because he was incensed by the deep suffering he witnessed there. He showed that if you can get something to work (which needs to be clearly defined) within difficult circumstances, you can get it work in many places around the world.

3) By any means necessary—building their new community health model went against conventional wisdom and rubbed people the wrong way. The effects of politics, egos, economics, and deeply-held belief systems about the poor didn’t help, either. Dr. Farmer and his colleagues at Partners in Health made the road by walking. They didn’t give up, stumbled, learned and came back with a sense of determination now commonly attributed to social entrepreneurs.

PIH now works in poor communities in the Caribbean (Haiti), Latin America (Peru, Mexico, Guatemala), Africa (Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi), the United States (Greater Boston) and Russia. It has nine sites in Haiti with four hospitals, mostly run by Haitians and approximately five thousand staff workers worldwide. Their success is noted world-wide. In an interview for the Huffington Post with Mark Klempner, Tracy Kidder says:

“…treating multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in poor countries was almost impossible when they started, but now that Partners In Health has driven the prices of the drugs down by more than 90 percent and they've developed protocols for how to treat it . . . I don't know how many countries it is now, maybe thirty or forty countries, who have adopted those prescriptions.”

The author met Dr. Farmer on a flight in 1994 and became quickly pulled into this world. He followed Dr. Farmer around for four years—taking countless trips with him that spanned the globe; from Moscow to Siberia to Peru to Mexico and of course, countless trips to Boston and Haiti. He “stumbled onto something great” which is exactly what I felt upon closing Mountains Beyond Mountains. Somehow I knew my perspective had forever been shifted.

Note: Dr. Farmer spoke at NYU last week, which is beautifully documented by Acumen Fund's Chief Administrative Officer and General Counsel, Ann MacDougall.