Samantha Rick is the Multilateral Engagement and Pandemic Preparedness Advocacy Specialist at AVAC where she coordinates AVAC’s engagement with the UN, WHO, and other multilateral bodies and oversees pandemic preparedness policy development and dissemination. In this role, Sam works to ensure equity provisions in emerging global health architecture negotiations, coordinates and contributes to civil society inputs to multilateral processes, and produces policy products that share and translates lessons from the HIV movement to pandemic preparedness and response. Since joining AVAC, Sam has published AVAC’s pandemic preparedness policy paper, solidifying and amplifying AVAC’s positions on key issues in global health, and has served as the NGO representative on the ACT-A Tracking & Monitoring Task Force and as a representative of the civil society support group of the WHO medical countermeasures platform development process.
Prior to joining AVAC, Sam served as Deputy Director of the Frontline Health Workers Coalition where she drove legislation, executed strategies to secure strong language in UN Declarations, and wrote and disseminated two reports on gender-related barriers to nurse leadership. She previously worked in the USAID Bureau for Global Health’s Office of Policy, Programs, and Planning.
Sam joined AVAC in 2021, bringing years of experience in multilateral engagement and coalition and alliance building. She holds an MA in Anthropology of Development and Social Transformation from the University of Sussex and a BA in Sociology from Boston University. In her free time, she loves traveling (she’s been to 60 countries so far!), making scones, gardening, and spending time with her cat, Giles.