Your Courage Moment
This is an opportunity to honor someone whose courage has shaped your life, or to share a moment where you were courageous. It might be something a parent, teacher, mentor, or stranger did that has stayed with you. It might be a decision you made yourself. Whatever the story, what makes it a Courage Moment is the choice to face risk to serve something larger than yourself.
What is Courage?
Courage is a decision to advance the common good despite risk.
Courage is service. It is deliberate.
Courage requires risk: to one’s body (physical courage), to one’s integrity, and even to one’s soul (moral courage).
Courage is larger than oneself.
The First Courage Moment
The first Courage Moment I’d like to share comes from my college friend, Dr. Raj Panjabi. Raj is a social entrepreneur and co-founder of Last Mile Health, which provides lifesaving care in rural Liberia, where he was born, and across West Africa. He has also served our country on the U.S. National Security Council as Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense.
We recorded this after running into each other at a conference in Washington, D.C. about a month before the book launch. I had been thinking about how to make the book more interactive, and threw out the idea to Raj after learning his firstborn son is named Abhay — a name that means “courage.”
Submit Your Courage Moment
Your submission will be part of a larger courage platform — a place that elevates the stories that don’t usually make the news. Submissions are private. I read every one. With your permission, I may follow up to ask whether you’d be open to sharing your story more publicly, the way my old college friend Dr. Raj Panjabi demonstrated.