Shared Harvest Foundation

Imagine a new generation of skills-based culturally rooted volunteers who are not shackled by student loan debt, but free to truly do the work that they love for others. Our empathy-driven tech is aimed at elevating the culture of volunteering by rewarding sweat equity equitably. I am applying for this prize in order acquire funds to help us advance our tech stack, and have the financial bandwidth and network support to truly actualize this vision.   I know that the work ahead of me requires me to break the shackles of mental poverty and it starts with creating a workplace that can afford to pay its workforce and provide basic healthcare and wellbeing benefits to allow my team to thrive, strategize and operationalize.  These funds would help staff our organization. With six figures of my own student loan debt makes it difficult to continue building unadulterated as I have tried for the past three years.  As a Black woman, the financial burden post-COVID is even greater.  These funds would allow me to not work additional night shifts in the hospital in order to keep my dream alive, but gives me the opportunity to be laser focused without hesitation.

I am an emergency doctor, social entrepreneur, and a champion for health equity. Inspired by the charitable works of my immigrant mother who died on my wedding day, I started my relentless path to serve the most vulnerable and the underdog. I completed completed a Masters in Global Public Health & Disaster Medicine and focused my career in understanding the social determinants of health in refugee, urban, and disaster settings. I served during Hurricane Katrina, the Ebola Pandemic, and many other humanitarian relief efforts across the US, Africa and the Caribbean.

During the coronavirus pandemic, I pivoted Shared Harvest to be a tactical community emergency response to a failed public health system impacting communities of color.  I saw the tragic loss of Black and brown lives in the hospital reminiscent of previous crisis that I worked. With rising fear, anxiety and despair, I couldn't stomach the devastation. I took action and mobilized resources to hardest hit communities in the form of human volunteer capital and advocacy.  I inspired other allied health professionals to collaborate and help to break bias and give my community a fighting chance.  

Click here to watch this passionate interview of me & breaking bias in medicine.

Shared Harvest aims to transform the liability of student debt into an asset class for social change. The student loan debt crisis isn't a small problem. It's a monumental problem to the tune of $1.6 trillion that affects approximately 44 million Americans , and the numbers continue to rise. The financial burden takes a mental and physical toll on the health of individuals and their families. Communities of color are disproportionately impacted and the racial gaps in student loan debt are wide. Black women carry the largest percentage of student loan debt than any subgroup yet still volunteer at greater proportion and suffer from greater income inequality.  The typical Black professional, 20 years after enrollment, owes approximately 95% of their student loan debt compared to the 6% owed by their white counterparts. 

Shared Harvest means to close the racial wealth gap and help all borrowers pay down their student loan debt while making the heart-work of healthcare and social justice reform sustainable.  We've created the marriage of Tinder and Peace Corp, an innovative volunteer app designed to fosters a mutually beneficial network that fights for health equity, supports antiracism work and rewards service for a better tomorrow.

Shared Harvest was a compilation of my lived experiences and the power of humanity to move mountains collectively.  I wanted to create a Peace Corp in my own backyard, where communities could see, cultivate and elevate their own heroes and combat socioeconomic disparities in healthcare through a economically sustainable service model.

When COVID-19 struck, Shared Harvest provided free pop-up community-based on four pillars: trust, test, tether and treat. We tethered individuals to a network of Community Health Partners (CHPs). We self-funded a Student Loan Relief Fund for frontline volunteers and essential workers. We impacted 10,000 lives and received accolades for effectively drawing the largest percentage of underrepresented minorities and refugees to testing sites both as participants and volunteers.

We built empathy-driven tech interface to connect with and reward volunteers, while also accessing pandemic resources and culturally sensitive crisis counselors so that no individual or community was left behind.

What is unique and disruptive about this work is that it is local and global. Volunteers can serve in the communities they care about whether local or remote. They can be deeply invested without having to be pulled into long term service careers, live abroad or divest from resource poor communities. 

In 2020, our organization was able to boldly pivot to focus on the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.  We branded our platform to myCOVIDMD.app and allowed our database of 5000 skills-based volunteers to connect with volunteer opportunities locally that we sponsored in the form of pop-up clinics, contact tracing and community vaccinations.  Through this, we created a reliable network and notoriety for capacity to mobilize and reach hot zones and Black and brown communities.  

We were able to scale our staffing to seven individuals and 80 volunteers in rotation per pop-up clinic.  Our pop-up clinics serve 300-400 people and are known for providing white glove treatment to those most disenfranchised.  We know that our approach has been affective because of the overwhelming success and the organization was invited to be designated state vaccination site early in the endeavor.  

I have utilized the success of our pivot to position the organization as a thought partner for health equity initiatives in Los Angeles and nationally.  I have used this opportunity to join communities on health equity and other leadership circles.  We aim to enroll companies, institutions and banking institutions as part of their Community Reinvestment Initiatives (CRI) and further sustain our loan forgiveness/relief program.