Last fall, when we chose the Ethics Champions theme for the 2020 Annual Dinner, we could have never anticipated the significance of its meaning or impact. Doubtless, many of the Champions that our institutional partners nominated to be honored in our original evening program consider themselves simply colleagues among a vast legion of champions who have literally and willingly placed their lives on the line daily for weeks in a way they never dreamed would be asked of them. We honor them all in tribute to what they represent in the face of unrelenting and overwhelming adversity. We honor their courage, conviction, perseverance and spirit in responding to the greatest global health tragedy in more than a century. We honor their “doing the right thing” and their belief that in doing so something better comes of it.

CONFRONTING ETHICAL CHALLENGES
In our Annual Report you will find a summary of the Center’s work in 2019 and a brief overview since the coronavirus pandemic redirected our efforts. The 2019 accomplishments are significant, and we remain grateful for your support of those programs and our eagerness to return to them in the future. This report also demonstrates the Center’s ability to respond quickly to the needs of our stakeholders and constituents. Finally, this report speaks to the importance of ethics in all our lives and livelihoods. The ethical challenges that lie ahead for this country and world are monumental and, quite frankly, a little overwhelming.

HOLDING OURSELVES ACCOUNTABLE
The devastation wreaked by this tiny virus will cause a reckoning for decades to come. It has laid bare the deep divisions and fissures of inequity and injustice in our healthcare systems. We will all be held accountable, individually and collectively, for how we raise and respond to the questions of what ought we to do, as we remain vigilant and begin to rebuild.

The Center stands with its Ethics Champions – all of them everywhere – in steadfast commitment to our core value: respect for human dignity. We must rebuild a health system that recognizes the intrinsic worth of all persons, listens to the voices of every child, youth, adult and elder of every tongue, embracing all forms of ability. We must rebuild a health system, an economy and a community that measures success in terms of how the least among us is served. Justice is not a notion; it is our imperative.