CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — This year’s Annual Meeting of the Cambridge-Yerevan Sister City Association (CYSCA) will take place virtually on ZOOM on Thursday, June 10 at 7 p.m. with guest speaker Dr. Lorky Libaridian of Cambridge Health Alliance speaking about COVID-19 in the Sister Cities of Cambridge and Yerevan.
At 8:00 pm, the annual business meeting will commence for CYSCA members and others who wish to become CYSCA members.
A graduate of Yale School of Medicine, Libaridian completed a combined residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Rochester, New York.
Libaridian is a physician and medical director for Performance Improvement in Primary Care at Cambridge Health Alliance. She completed a fellowship in Innovation supported by the Gold Foundation. Her work and research interests include improving chronic disease management, pediatric well care and vaccination. She is an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Libaridian’s experience in healthcare in Armenia spans several decades and includes work in Armenia focusing on education and training of family medicine residents as well as practicing primary care physicians using group and problem based participatory methods. She has presented and lectured at numerous conferences in Armenia. During this past year, her work in Armenia has focused on healthcare worker trainings related to Covid as well as working with public health and mental health initiatives related to events of the past year.
The mission of CYSCA is to foster friendship, mutual trust and dynamic interaction between the peoples of Cambridge and Yerevan as well as their neighboring regions; to build links between them; to promote public awareness of issues of mutual concern; and to appreciate and accommodate the various manifestations of diversity in these communities.
CYSCA was the brainchild of a group of concerned citizens of Cambridge, who believed they could help promote world peace by organizing a grass roots movement through a partnership with a city in a Soviet republic. In May 1986,former Mayor and then City Councilor Frank Duehay led a mission of 11 Cambridge citizens to Yerevan, the capital of the Republic of Armenia, to present a formal proposal to the Mayor of Yerevan expressing the desire of the city of Cambridge to become a sister city with Yerevan. Following an exchange of official delegations and signing of protocols, a formal agreement was executed between the two sister cities in 1987, during an official visit by a Yerevan delegation to Cambridge. Soon thereafter, CYSCA joined Sister Cities International (SCI), an umbrella organization that supports more than 1000 U.S. sister cities and their foreign partners. Through its association with SCI, CYSCA has obtained funding support for many of its important projects.
