Chapters:
0:00 - Intro with Joanna Junak 0:38 - GFN Voices with GFN 2022 guest speaker Anne Molloy, interviewed by Brent StaffordTranscription:
Joanna: Hello and welcome. I'm Joanna Junak and today we are inviting you for the next part of GFN Voices with Anne Molloy, wife of our late colleague Kevin. Kevin worked with KAC Communications sister company Knowledge Action Change, as head of the Tobacco Harm Reduction Scholarship Program. Anne was a special guest during this year's Global Forum on Nicotine conference. Let's hear from Anne.
Brent: So you have a very special relationship with this event. Tell us about that.
Anne: So my husband ran the scholarship program when it first started and he would come here to the GFN conference with his scholars and then they developed the Enhanced Scholarship Program. So there was another group of scholars that were getting further development, sadly Kevin contracted lung cancer in 2019. He just been to India with KAC and they’ve been over to Malawi. When he came back from India, he had some pain here and he started to lose his voice and I thought it was cause of a pollution in India. And it turned out that he had lung cancer and had developed too far and he passed away last year.
Brent: In October in London, there were very special event was held during the Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction. What are you doing here now in Poland in memory?
Anne: So at Kevin's funeral, the main team were there and they came up with this fantastic idea to see if they could get funding for the fellowship. So these were professional career developments for people who had gone through the scholarship and Enhanced Scholarship Program, an opportunity to take it a bit further and they managed to get funding from the foundation. So that was announced in October at Guild Hall. And Paddy said to me when I like to come out here to Poland to present the awards, and I just jumped at the opportunity because Kevin had always loved this conference, he always came back really fired up from it. So the opportunity to come here and experience the conference, experience wonderful Warsaw were brilliant. So I jumped to that opportunity and came here and presented the awards.
Brent: So tell us, why are the scholarships important?
Anne: Well, I think the main thing is that as a scholar you need to keep on developing yourself and it's important that you develop not only your particular field of research, but that you also develop yourself professionally so that you have confidence in asserting the knowledge that you found. So all three scholars are going on to do Masters. So I just think that's amazing because I think Kevin's own professional development really started with his Master's in Business Administration where he moved, he was working with service users in drug and alcohol field and he wanted to move to a more strategic level. And in order to do that, he needed to have a Masters really. So that enabled him to then take those more strategic positions and develop his career. So what I think is these people that have got the fellowships, they too will go on to develop their careers. And they come from countries such as Malawi, Afghanistan. These people do not have the opportunity to financially fund themselves through this. So they're going to places like the medical school in Paris, they're going to Oxford University. One is remaining in malaria. But it's just brilliant to see that development and then the impact that will have because this conference is so inclusive. It really is global. I think a lot of things talk about being global, but actually they're probably a little bit first world. And this is when you look around, when you see where people have come from, and when you see where the scholars are coming from, they are coming from the countries where vaping is not allowed. Often they don't have that equipment material. So they're they're looking to develop this in order to quit smoking.