Below is the address that I gave at the Commencement Ceremony for the 2013 Connecticut Health Leadership Fellow program last month. I've been meaning to post it for a while. It seems particularly apropos as part of the recent discussions about race following the George Zimmerman trial.

Last month, I went to three different commencement ceremonies and heard three different speeches. Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill told the graduates at UConn that people don’t remember commencement speeches. I don’t remember much else that she said. Film maker Joss Whedon told the graduating class at Wesleyan, “You are all going to die” and went on to talk about how we should live our lives. Yet the speech that really stuck with me was by Reverend Liz Walker who spoke about how as the world gets smaller, we are going to realize that people different from us, ‘they’ are really ‘us’.

In many ways, she provided a theme for my thinking about my experiences as a member of the 2013 Fellows class. I've always been ambivalent, at best, about leadership. It has always seemed to me that leaders are too often the people seeking to maintain a system that brings privileges to those leaders and their friends at the expense of everyone else. Yet this program has been about changing systems to bring equity, not maintain privilege. Our class has identified ourselves as agitators, and that’s a label I gladly wear.

I felt a bit uncomfortable about coming into this class for a couple different reasons. Addressing health disparities was not a big concern for me when I started this program. I've always been an equal opportunity agitator, railing against any sort of inequality or injustice… but, as Martin Luther King said, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane”. So, I've greatly appreciated our time working together to address health disparities.

Another thing that made feel a little uncomfortable coming into this program is all the really bright and impressive other members of the class of 2013. Between the MDs, PhD’s, Professors and numerous other titles, I wondered how a college dropout like me would fit in. I felt like an outsider, an interloper.

The Diversity Walk that we did a few months ago helped illustrate that all of us, are at times, the outsiders, the interlopers and at other times, privileged and in power. At various times, we are the ‘us’ and at other times, we are the ‘them’. Instead of ‘us’ trying to be more like ‘them’, or wanting ‘them’ to become more like ‘us’, we need to recognize the value that each person brings, no matter what their educational background, race, gender, sexual preference, or any other labels that we choose to divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’. A sermon I recently heard, put it nicely in terms of seeking unity, not uniformity.

So, as we think about this unity, it is perhaps useful to think about the word ‘fellowship’. We often think of this in terms of an award bestowed by a foundation or university, yet it is important to think about a more common form of the word, “A close association of friends or equals sharing similar interests.”

And perhaps that is the most important part of what this year has been about, establishing long lasting friendships that will carry us forward as we work together to eliminate health disparities.

As many of you know, this past year has been especially challenging for me, and from a time management sense, it might have been much easier if I didn't have all the Fellows activities to juggle along with everything else. But really, it probably would have been much more difficult if I didn't have all of my new friends from the Fellowship supporting me.

So now, the 2013 program comes to an end and we commence our ongoing work together to fight health disparities. To all the fellows, from this year and previous years, let’s stay in touch. I hope you’re all in the LinkedIn group. I hope you all get involved with affinity groups and I look forward to working alongside you.

Thank you.