Rice alum takes a stand
Dan Erchick ’07 wins Linda Faye Williams Prize in Social Justice for work with amputees

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Dan Erchick ’07 graduated from Rice with a degree in biology, but he’s since become a budding engineer and politician. For that he can thank both his experience with Rice’s Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB) initiative and his passion for doing the right thing.

Erchick, 25, is this year’s recipient of the Linda Faye Williams Prize in Social Justice. He is the third to receive the award, which is given annually to a senior or recent graduate (within five years) who enables understanding across boundaries of race, religion, gender, ethnicity, class, nationality, sexual orientation and ideology. The prize comes with a $1,000 stipend.

	PHOTO COURTESY OF DAN ERCHICK
	Dan Erchick ’07 is shown at a gathering at the Fatima Amputee Community Primary School outside Makeni, Sierra Leone, where he’s been working with amputees and other disabled people to advocate improvements to their educational and job opportunities.

The former Brown College resident worked for two years after graduation as a program associate for Rice’s global health program, where he excelled in implementing program activities that focus on undergraduate education in global health technologies and outreach to Houston-area high schools.

But his work for Rice went far beyond the job description, according to BTB officials, who recommended him for the award. He also mentored a student design team developing a prosthetic foot for use in the developing world and traveled to Haiti with students while laying the groundwork for his own plan to help amputees regain dignity through entrepreneurship and education.

“Dan is positive, efficient, self-starting and passionate about serving the poor and marginalized,” said Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering, professor of electrical and computer engineering and founding director of Rice 360˚: Institute for Global Health Technologies. “In all that he does, Dan is motivated by a genuine concern for the poor that outweighs his own desire for accolades.”

Erchick spent most of the past year on a Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship in Sierra Leone, where a civil war that tore the West African nation apart in the 1990s continues to resonate. Erchick’s work in a clinic, where he built and fitted prostheses for amputees, most of whom lost arms or legs in the war, brought him to the realization that the disabled in developing nations need more than limbs.

“Getting the device they needed to walk or a prosthetic hand was just the first step,” he said. “They needed access to education, the chance to get a job, and if they were parents themselves, they needed money to send their children to school.”

Having built a strong relationship with the amputee and disabled community in Sierra Leone, Erchick developed a program to advocate for their rights and livelihoods. He also worked at a Prosthetics Outreach Foundation clinic to integrate low-cost prosthetic and orthotic technologies like a prosthetic ankle block, which strengthens the connection between a prosthetic leg and foot.

Erchick has never considered himself disabled, though he was born without a left arm and uses a prosthesis. “Growing up in the United States, I would as much as possible try to throw off that term, because I just wanted to be a normal person and have the same challenges as everyone else,” he said. But amputees, he said, see him as one of them. “It has given me an almost immediate connection to them in their minds.”

As an advocate for improved access to education, employment and health care for the disabled in Sierra Leone’s Bombali District, he formed a coalition to represent amputees, victims of polio and leprosy, the sight- and hearing-impaired and the intellectually challenged. Nearly 100 people paid for their own transportation to attend the coalition’s first meeting in March; for many, it meant going without a meal that day. Attendees packed a United Nations conference room and hallways and listened in from the outside through windows, Erchick recalled.

He has continued to work with community members for government funding to improve schools for the disabled. He will travel back to Sierra Leone for another year of work before entering a master’s program at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in July 2011.

“I’m discouraged by people who start things and don’t finish them, especially in developing countries,” he said. “It not only sets a bad example, it lets people down because you make promises and don’t follow through.”

Williams, a 1970 graduate who died in 2006, was one of Rice’s first black undergraduate students to earn a bachelor’s degree after Rice abandoned a charter provision that limited enrollment to white students. She was a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland and an expert on race and gender politics.

Those who would like to contact Erchick about his work can reach him at erchick@alumni.rice.edu.