Health In Harmony (HIH) is a Portland, Oregon based non-profit whose mission is to foster innovative solutions to the crisis of human disease and environmental destruction facing our planet. HIH partners with Alam Sehat Lestari, an Indonesian non-profit organization co-founded by Dr. Kinari Webb, Dr. Hotlin Ompusunggu and Dr. Antonia Gorog. The Indonesian name means Healthy Nature Everlasting and the shortening, ASRI, means harmoniously balanced. True to its name, ASRI combines health care, conservation, environmental education and medical training in Sukadana, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. 

ASRI works with local communities to integrate high-quality, affordable health care with strategies to protect the threatened rain forests of Gunung Palung National Park.

Because HIH and ASRI believe that human and environmental health are inextricably linked, their work encompasses multiple fields of impact. It is at the intersection of these that the health of the whole – the whole person as well as the health of the whole planet – is achieved.

The daily news brings stories of individuals, families and national health systems in crisis. A quieter, deeper crisis hums beneath these stories – one in which basic human needs and the integrity of the natural environment are pitted against each other.

When families in Indonesia must log tropical forests to pay for basic needs such as health care, the impacts are manifold: habitat for rare and endangered species is destroyed; fields are flooded and crops destroyed; increased standing water increases the incidence of diseases like malaria and dengue fever; and the degradation of global air quality impacts all of us, across the planet.

In West Kalimantan, Indonesia, poor health and grinding poverty push human populations to engage in illegal logging for survival, putting vital rainforest habitat at risk. Logging provides a short-term fix, with long-term consequences for valuable plant and animal species, human health, and global climate change.

HIH and ASRI are working to provide an innovative, effective solution that empowers individuals to safeguard their own health and the health of their families, while preserving the natural environment.The vision for Health In Harmony began more than 15 years ago, when undergraduate biology major Kinari Webb traveled to West Kalimantan, Indonesia to pursue a dream of studying orangutans. While in the forests of Gunung Palung National Park, she recognized the direct link between the environmental destruction wrought by illegal logging, the desperate state of human health in the communities around the park, and the impact of rain forest loss on health worldwide.

Thirteen years later, Dr. Kinari Webb returned to the Gunung Palung communities to turn her long-held vision – a comprehensive program that would both serve human health needs and preserve rain forest habitat – into reality.

Through this approach that works at the intersection of human and environmental health, Health In Harmony provides a model that will, in years to come, be replicated to create lasting change in countries, and communities, around the world.

Health In Harmony’s critical support has made the following highlights possible:

- more than 14,000 patients & 20,000 patient visits since the clinic opened in July, 2007;
- established a DOTs program for prevention of drug-resistant tuberculosis;
- created an incentive program to provide health care rewards in exchange for rainforest protection;
- initiated an innovative reforestation program to restore damaged rainforest habitat;
- began an organic farm training program to assist community members in establishing better livelihoods, better nutrition, and a healthier relationship with the natural environment;
- distributed goats to widows to help provide a critical component to our organic farming work.

Klinik ASRI is connecting human and environmental health by providing healthcare at affordable rates – including barter for reforestation supplies, organic manure for organic farming, native handicrafts and labor- as well a discounted ‘green credit’ system for villages not involved in illegal logging of the local Gunung Palung National Park. It’s the heart of ASRI’s work, providing a community space and invaluable healthcare, as well as symbolizing the key insight of Health In Harmony’s founder Kinari Webb: we must take care of human health and environmental health simultaneously.

Now, Health In Harmony and ASRI are planning to expand the ASRI Klinik into a much-needed hospital; with your donation we can make that happen! For just $2,500 we can provide a radiology room for digital x-ray image processing and reading (without the use of dangerous chemicals). Or, for $10,000, we can fund an entire outpatient exam room. By helping to build this hospital, you will not only be providing an important health center for villagers in need, but you will also be helping to protect the forests of West Kalimantan from environmental destruction and the orangutans from losing their habitat.  

To learn more about the amazing work of HIH, ASRI, and Dr. Kinari Webb, please visit: www.healthinharmony.org