Leda Health

Winning the Elevat Prize funding would enable our business in ensuring that our resources are able to reach as many people as possible. It would allow us to fund our survivor healing circles so that survivors can access healing at little to no cost. It would allow us to produce and donate self-use kits to the communities and institutions that need them most. It would allow us to ensure that members of our team have the resources they need to act as advocates while also coping themselves with the gravity of the problem we are solving.

Madison is a young sexual assault advocate, survivor, and technological innovator.  Madison is the CEO of Leda Health, formerly known as MeToo Kits Company. In 2019, Madison co-founded MeToo Kits Company in Brooklyn, New York to create a system meant to solve the issues with how sexual assault is managed. She also considered how survivors feel physically and mentally and the impact this has on reporting. While the initial idea was an at-home sexual assault examination kit, Madison and her co-founder Liesel realized that much more work must be done to resolve the widespread issues. Using her experience with mathematical modeling and epidemiology as well as policy and women’s rights, Madison determined that MeToo Kits Company was ready to evolve. Thus, from MeToo Kits grew Leda Health, the survivor company. The company is seeking to revolutionize forensic collection, testing, and connect survivors with medical professionals and supportive communities to aid them in their recovery process. The restoration of autonomy and the administration of care is of the utmost importance. This is what Madison, and Leda Health, aim to achieve.

In the United States, 77% of sexual assaults go unreported. To us, this demonstrates a failure in our national healthcare systems. Even if a survivor chooses to report, they are unlikely to be examined by a certified sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE). There are only 1,231 registered SANEs nationwide out of the 3,800,000 total registered nurses. Hospitals are understaffed and unable to tend to every sexual assault survivor. Survivors are often psychologically incapable of enduring an intrusive procedure at the hands of an individual shortly after their assault and DNA collection is time-sensitive.

Our work is different because it goes beyond a kit and aims to provide survivor-centric care. After evidence is collected, we keep survivors in the loop and offer them various other resources and information, including local shelters, local hospitals, and our survivor support groups. We are working to create a community forum where survivors and their friends/families can communicate. We also always aim to take care of each and every adult survivor that comes our way in whatever other ways they might need. While our competitors focus on the materials within kits (which are difficult to understand and are not user-friendly), our business seeks to make evidence collection a simple, user-friendly process and to support survivors every step of the way. 

Our business has helped numerous sexual assault survivors heal through our survivor healing circles, where survivors from all walks of life come together to heal through various mediums of therapy. Many of the survivors in these groups were able to develop a healthier relationship with sex and come to better terms with the fact that they dealt with these experiences. Our business also gives a voice to the 77% of sexual assault survivors who do not report their sexual assault through traditional means in this country. These survivors, for personal reasons including fear of retraumatization or discomfort with authorities, opt not to report and therefore do not receive any care whatsoever – not evidence collection, and not counseling services. We are providing another option so that survivors can take the first step to heal on their terms.