About Alanna

I’ve been working in international education and development for twenty years, mostly in global health. I’m co-founder of a tiny global health consultancy called Tomorrow Global and I’m an American currently based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

I’m a senior TED fellow, and I have given four TED talks. Two were great, one was okay, and one was a fiasco. You can see the great ones online at the TED site here and here. The second talk, on covid-19, has about 15 million views across the various distribution channels and I am still reeling in shock. The others are hidden under the links back there on the YouTube archive. I also wrote a short book on global health under the TEDBooks imprint, called What’s Killing Us, and I was published in the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education last year.

I love coaching people. I love helping them find their own answers. I think that we all need to be very brave in this damaged world, and I want to help people be as brave as they need to be. Sometimes brave is about knowing your options so you feel comfortable speaking out. Sometimes it’s about knowing what fights you can win and what fights are worth fighting, even if you lose. Sometimes it’s incredibly pragmatic, like helping people get a great new job where they can have real impact on the world. Whatever brave is for you, I’d love to help you find it.

If you’d like to see more of my writing, the archive for my international development blog is at bloodandmilk.org and I occasionally write for UN Dispatch on global health.