CT Wealth Accelerator

Teresa Chahine

Welcome to Impact and Innovation. I'm Teresa Chahine and I'm inviting you inside my classroom at Yale School of Management as we grapple with questions on social entrepreneurship and impact.

TC:

All right, everyone, welcome back. We are deep in the midst of the public health entrepreneurship course fall 2025, and in the middle of the corresponding season of impact and innovation. So it's such a treat to have Olivia Francis here with me today. Olivia took this course the last time I taught it, which was nine months ago. So today you're going to get an inside scoop into what's been going on in the course that's behind the season of the podcast. And what's going on behind the scenes? Well, it's pretty public, but in the general space of public health as I teach this course, Olivia, welcome back. It's so good to have you here. I was just reflecting to myself that when I taught this course, when you took it in January, 2025, it basically started two days after inauguration, and I had to reinvent the whole course kind of.

I had been teaching it since fall 2015 with my co-instructor at my former institution. That's the precursor of this course, and we always taught it in a specific way. I never really brought politics that much into it. We talked about the external climate to whatever degree it was relevant, but when I started teaching this course on January 22 or 24, I don't remember, 2025, it was a moment where I was like, wow, how do we talk about health equity right now in this context and what are the ways that I need to reframe this course to engage everybody? One of the things that I have been sharing with colleagues lately is that it never occurred to me before 2025 to even wonder what the political backgrounds of my students were. I never used to look at someone and say, is this a democrat? Is this a Republican?

I was just like, this is someone who's into public health, entrepreneurship and health equity and innovation, so I don't really care what political party they're affiliated with. But I was so cognizant this January about that, about what was going on, about how divisive these topics were, how triggering some words were. And so I really reinvented the course to speak to the times to speak to the politics of public health and of entrepreneurship, and that's why I requested to teach it first thing this academic year so that I could build on that momentum. And today we taught the case of Health in Her Hue. So a few months ago in the last season, we had Ashley Wisdom, the founder of Health and her, you join us in class, and that's when you connected with her and was invited to join the team. So tell us a little bit about that before we dig in to the meaty topics we're going to cover today.

Olivia Francis:

Yeah, of course. Well, thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure so far. And yeah, my experience with Health Henry Hug has been really, really great so far. I found Ashley through your class, which was a great opportunity that I think especially during these times of what you're mentioning, this political climate, you have to be more innovative and reach out to these unconventional ways of partnering and innovating. So in your class, I knew right away that I was really going to enjoy this particular case just given my experience in maternal and child health and wanting a commitment to advancing maternal and child health equity and my experience in clinical and research experience both locally and abroad. And so Ashley's mission completely aligned with my mission, so I knew that was my goal to talk to her after class. So that's what I did. And right away it was a quick introduction of connecting with one of the program managers. And so I did the interview with a panel of different team members in Health interview, and they were so welcoming and warm. It was a pretty casual interview just about my interests, about their interests, seeing if that really aligned. It seemed like type of interview. And based off of the response, it seemed like it did. So I got accepted to be a virtual care squad facilitator. So that's incoming in the works.

TC:

That's so exciting. And for those who didn't catch the episode with Ashley in last season's podcast, health in Her Hue is a digital health startup. It's a website that helps black women connect with healthcare providers that they trust, that provide culturally relevant care through this provider directory that Ashley and her team have put together, and also with other women like them in community. And that's where the care squad comes in. Like a woman has her own care squad of women going through the same things she is with a facilitator like yourself who will be facilitating that conversation. And then I think they have online content and those are their three main pillars, right?

OF:

Yeah, exactly. So it's just building that community, building that trusted community of having someone who has that lived experience and uplifting that and connecting with someone who has that lived experience but doesn't have that knowledge and information. And so we as facilitators are responsible for connecting them to those information, to the referrals, to the doctors that we trust and vet to help support them in their health journey.

TC:

Tell me a little bit about yourself before we dive into the evolution of public health, which is today's topic and what your training and background is and how you ended up there.

OF:

Yeah, so I'm originally from Las Vegas, Nevada, so I'm a little bit.

TC:

That’s so cool. I don't think I know anyone originally from Las Vegas.

OF:

Yeah, I get that quite a lot. I did not grow up in a hotel around the strip, but close enough. So definitely a lot of misconceptions, both correct, maybe a little incorrect sort of deal, but

TC:

I get it.

OF:

I lived in Las Vegas in the suburbs, which is still called Las Vegas. Not all of it is city and glam. And so I grew up as a Pell Grant student. I went to the University of Pittsburgh where I studied honor psychology with a minor in Africana studies and certificates in global health and a bioethics certificate all under a pre-med, pre-PA track. And from that experience, I realized that there weren't a lot of people that looked like me in the pre-med space. So I quickly shifted to pre-PA a very physician assistant. If people aren't familiar or associate that's very well connected to the same type of care that they're meant to give patients, it provides this holistic viewpoint while having a work-life balance type of profession. But when I went to Kenya, I was interning with the CDC where I was focusing on maternal and child health, infant mortality prevention and an innovation that they were doing there funded by Bill Gates.

And from that experience, it was a public health internship. And at the time I was applying to pre PA schools, I was applying to PA schools, and I was in the process of getting ready to travel for interviews and I had gotten waitlisted and it kind of just opened my eyes going to Africa for the first time being embedded in a public health space for the first time, just having all these new experiences and leading me to this point where I thought I knew what I wanted. But then just realizing at that point that that wasn't necessarily maybe God's plan, I was just like, it was an eyeopener, just saying that I really liked this public health space. It wasn't a current undergrad option as far as majors at the time at my school. So I think that's a big reason why I didn't explore it at the time, but just happen to get that exposure from that experience that a lot of people that look like me don't get to have.

I just so happened to be very fortunate of getting a nationality room scholarship that is meant to fund study abroad programs on a very large scale, a lot of money towards having students pursue their dreams. And I was coming out of COVID a very rough two years in undergrad during COVID, Pell Grant student getting kicked out of my dorm, getting kicked out of basically my work study and not being able to work. And I use that same time that reminds me a lot of the times that we're having right now to be unconventional, to be innovative. And so I cold email different people. I knew I wanted to be in the research space. That didn't really happen for a lot of people that look like me, especially if you're a Pell Grant student on work study, that's not usually an option. Usually you have to do a desk job, which I did at a writing center or AmeriCorps, which I had a great time doing, but it wasn't on the pre-med track that I wanted to pursue.

So emailing people and someone just taking a chance on me and just doing the extra steps and making it my work study. So that really was the domino effect of me going to Kenya and doing that research. And then that led me really here at the Yale School of Public Health. If it weren't for those partnerships in that community of people trusting me and taking a chance on me, I wouldn't be where I am today. So I'm very appreciative of all those people, the partnerships, the support to get me to where I am today. So that's mainly my background.

TC:

And we're going to circle back to your next steps in a little bit. But first I just want to talk about what it's like to graduate with a degree in public health in 2025. So I finished my degree in 2010, and some of the things that I felt at the time was I felt a restlessness to take action. I felt that my public health training was really about studying problems but not necessarily creating solutions. And that's kind of how I got into social entrepreneurship. It had this restlessness to create impact a few years after I graduated was the 100 year anniversary of public health education in 2013. And some of the volunteer work I did and committee work around that really got me thinking when public health education started, the limiting factor was knowledge. We needed new knowledge, we needed new research so that we could take action. But fast forward a hundred years, our actions haven't kept up with the knowledge that we've generated and the research that we've done. And I felt the action was the limiting factor. So that really informed my decision to get into social entrepreneurship. And I remember thinking that one of the things I felt most excited about was finding ways to create connections between a very isolated public health community and the rest of the world, like the private sector and letting them be part of the solution, not just part of the problem and not being really siloed within public health. And it seems to me that now more than ever, that's important. So tell me how you've experienced it and what your classmates are like. What's the vibe now? 15 years later,

OF:

What a crazy time to graduate with a public health degree. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely been tough. I mean, straight after graduating from the Yale School of Public Health, I went straight to Uganda. I just came back less than two months ago doing some great impactful boots on the ground type of research and villages in Punte Uganda with Empower through Health, where I got to focus on research and clinical work that's very close to my heart on family planning and attitudes and perspectives, talking to the community, listening to the community through qualitative, in-depth interviews and quantitative surveys and understanding their perspectives and attitudes on that. So that was a really great transition for me. I mean, I was also very lucky. I feel like first time I was very lucky to go to Kenya, just the way it all turned out. I don't have just the nationality room scholarship to thank.

I gathered every single bit penny that I thought I would need to go to Africa and then some, because I had never been to Africa. I had never done any global health work. And now I've done it a few times and now I'm just like, okay, this is fun. I like doing this. And I don't have just them to thank, I have the Africana Studies Department to thank where they gave me a credit card to just have my basic needs met. I needed a new suitcase. I've never traveled international before that I needed a big suitcase to get around. I have the African Studies department who also funded to pay for the rest of it as far as what that looks like as far as being their room and board or just if I needed something. So just having this big community backing me up and saying, yes, you can do this.

And on top of that, having it be people that look like me is also just the rewarding part. And so thinking about times now, I was lucky enough to get an internal grant from the Yale Women's Faculty Forum that clearly saw something in me as well to support this research because global health and public health is under attack as far as funding that I see just from my own experience in different realms, but also just I see it every day on LinkedIn. Somebody gets laid off or they're open to work, sign on their little LinkedIn profile page and saying, it's been a year or some months or this many interviews or this many just ghosting, just so much negativity out there. So it was nice to go into a transition where I could just escape that in a selfish way to a sense, to go to Uganda and do some work that I'm very passionate about along with other people who are really passionate about it and just have a little bit of hope and just a smile and just do the work because public health isn't easy work. I mean, we know that from many, many times. This is not the first time. So it's definitely been tough, but we're tougher, we're resilient, and we have each other to thank and to uplift each other. So I'm seeing that in a lot of small different ways in how I went to Uganda from hopefully just future endeavors.

TC:

What are some things that your classmates and you are leaning towards or looking for as you're figuring out how to chart your path and how to navigate these times? I remember one student came to my class in January and there was a wait list and she was saying, I don't care if I get in. I'm just going to come every session because my advisor just lost all her grant funding. I'm a basic scientist. I have no career. I need to figure out a new career, no more funding. And so I need to learn about entrepreneurship. I need to learn about other paths. What approaches and attempts have you seen from your classmates in your community?

OF:

Yeah, if there is a will, there's a way. I mean, when you have someone that looks like me, you have to think innovative. You have to think outside the box, not just for black women, but just for marginalized communities in general who are underrepresented. A lot of people don't get to the place that I'm at, even just personally. I mean, I still have a lot further I want to go, but even just the privilege of just sitting here talking with you, talking about this saying I graduated from the Yale School of Public Health, it's a privilege that

TC:

I feel it's a privilege for me too. It's

OF:

A big privilege that I try not to take for granted and use it in my positionality when talking to people because I'm not the same Olivia I was five years ago when I was an undergrad Pell Grant student, struggling to kind of really make ends meet. I feel like I'm in a whole different space, at least mentally, to hopefully serve people who uplift me and do the same for others. And so I feel like though Olivia back then was innovative, Olivia had a hunger to her and emailed so many different random people. Once I had to get kicked out of my dorm during COVID, that's another public health crisis where you had to either sink or swim really to put it bluntly. And I decided I wanted to swim, so I had to go back home and I couldn't work. And of course the refunds were great and all, but I knew I wanted to work.

I knew I wanted to make this an opportunity rather than just a sad time that happened. So I took initiative and emailed different people and asked them to just take a chance on me, and that's when my research journey really started and one person did take a chance on me, and that was my first research experience, and it really just created a domino effect. So I feel like we're definitely seeing that right now among me and my classmates and even people that I've worked decades in the field, the unfortunate layoffs and things like that. People are starting to just be more innovative in what that looks like. It looks different for every single person. That could mean emailing different people. I know that is, for me, just talking to different people, that means taking up opportunities like this, just talking to people and sharing expertise in a different type of way. Or a lot of people are just starting businesses. A lot of people are going back home and waiting it out. A lot of people are taking unconventional jobs just to make ends meet because that's valid. I mean, bill still got to get paid. So that's kind of mostly what I'm seeing right now. And it's not the first time this has happened might not be the last. It's definitely a rough time, but public health knows a thing or two about tough times and resilience.

TC:

Well, speaking to you definitely gives me hope for the field in general. And when you were saying you had to sink or swim, I was thinking, yep, public health as a field has to sink or swim right now. And one thing you said really resonated about making this an opportunity rather than a side time, a sad time that happened. I think we all need to do that within the field of public health. So you mentioned a couple of organizations that are kind of similar to health in that probably came up in a similar way when needs were not being met and resources were being challenged. They started them. So I think you shared before that you want to go back to med, you do want to pursue medical school, so you're kind of circling back to your original desire.

OF:

Yeah, it's full circle. So yeah, now I'm studying for the mcat, wanting to pursue that in hopefully a few years.

TC:

And you want to specialize in maternal psychiatry, right?

OF:

Specifically reproductive psychiatry, reproductive psychiatry. I got that one. It's a pretty new term that I learned just about a year ago myself. It's not too many providers that do that work, but I think it's a very underserved, both realms, both reproductive work and mental health work. They're both very underserved. So together, especially for my community, I am just really drawn to it.

TC:

And you shared some organizations where a founder created a new model. For example, I think you talked about the Motherhood Center, right? For Reproductive Psychiatry. Can you share a little bit more about that?

OF:

Yeah, I definitely know a few organization. Me, myself, I'm a birth and postpartum doula through Mama Glow, which is a New York organization that I think is also very, very embedded in community engaged work and health equity and focuses a lot on marginalized communities given that there's a big maternal mortality crisis, especially in New York, it's even higher than the national rate. And so I got to connect from there a lot of different places just through networking. I found Mama Glow through my internship with the New York City Department of Health where I did data management and evaluation work with the Citywide Doula Initiative. So that was kind of the first time where doula kind of popped into my head. And so I've never looked back since a year ago. I've taken the pledge, done all the trainings. I even delivered my first two babies in Uganda while I was there. Was that

TC:

Just a separate thing? You went there to do research?

OF:

Was that part the program itself, you had an option to do a clinical experience. Got it. Given my clinical experience as a medical assistant and a patient care technician, I decided to do the clinical experience as well. And it was mostly supposed to be more of just a look and see, but a midwife really saw something in me and guided me through the whole thing and guided me through it twice. And I delivered to both very happy baby girls. So that was a really great experience. That's

TC:

Awesome. And it really speaks to the name of the organization that you went through, empower Through Health. The idea is both to empower others through health, but also you seem empowered through your clinical service and health.

OF:

Yeah, definitely. I just see that in a lot of different organizations, like the One Motherhood Center is a very great model. I learned about them quite recently over the past few weeks maybe, so I'm not too familiar, but just speaking to the founder, it's very embedded in just health equity and maternal child health equity and advancing that. And the founder is a reproductive psychiatrist. So that was the first reproductive psychiatrist I even ever met was a few weeks ago, but a social worker had popped the idea into my head about a year ago. So it's nice to see that evolution of just seeing the person doing the work and seeming very, very, very passionate about the work.

TC:

Yeah, I think that it's interesting how just one thing leads to another and how the path appears after you take the first step. I think that your career trajectory has really been illustrative of that quote, like the internship with the New York City Department Health Department and then how that connected you to the Citywide Doula Initiative. And that connected you to the Mama Glow Foundation, which you did your doula training in and now learning about maternal psychiatry. I checked out the Motherhood Center after you mentioned it, and it's basically a clinic that provides mental health services for new mothers because it is such a challenging time with postpartum depression and so many other complications. And you mentioned our culture care also as another example you came across. Tell us more about that.

OF:

Yeah, so I found out about them when I was at the Doula Expo for Mama Glow. They do that pretty often, usually annually. And I got invited last year and I met the founder and they do very similar work to health interview in everybody in the sense that they're also just wanting to uplift our community, the black women who aren't being seen by doctors and having those black doctors at the forefront of a platform where you can connect with them directly and have that representation or just feel seen.

TC:

I checked out some of these websites when we were chatting earlier, our Culture Care and Mama Glow Foundation, and they emphasized some of the statistics that are out there about how black women have four times as higher rate of death during childbirth have. Right? Did I get that statistic right?

OF:

Yes. I believe so. It's even worse in New York.

TC:

Yeah. Have the poorest health outcomes in the country. Some of that is related to social drivers of health and health equity in general. Some of it is related to how they're treated by doctors, which is what got Ashley to start health in her hue and not having culturally relevant care. Some of it is related to their distrust of the US healthcare system for historical reasons, which leads them to engage less, less early and less frequently, which will lead to poorer health outcomes and higher costs. And so all of these startups are basically saying the same thing, that it's by us for us and providing relevant care for the patient.

OF:

Yeah, exactly. For us in bias, I love that term, and that's a pretty big term that I do and try to live by, and especially as a mixed methods researcher. And also working with the Substances and Sexual Health lab, a very community base, participatory research and community engaged and making sure the work that we do is co-developed COD with that community. And so it could be perfectly made for them and by them.

TC:

And the coolest part is that these women are finding different models for doing this work ranging from a nonprofit model like the Mama Glow Foundation, where they get grants and partnerships with for-profit companies and grant making organizations. So they really have diversified their revenue stream even within a nonprofit model to ranging to a for-profit venture backed model like health in her hue, where Ashley was able to raise venture capital. And really the core thesis there is that in health equity, we always talk about valuing life and valuing the life of a woman, of a person of color, et cetera. But that's not what venture capitalists are sit around talking about. And the fact that Ashley and others have been able to raise venture capital for these startups speaks to the fact that they're able to demonstrate value on multiple fronts, not just like a health and human rights value, but also a financial value.

Like everyone does better when these health disparities go away. And health plans want to pay for companies like health in her Hue to help their patients engage with the healthcare system and get better outcome and lower cost. And something Ashley said really resonated with me, and she has her master's in public health as well, and she was saying, there's an opportunity there how you were saying about make this as an opportunity rather than a sad thing that happened. There's an opportunity here to help reduce these disparities and help health black women be healthy. And if I don't seize this opportunity and get this funding and start this, someone else will and they're going to profit from it. And so if anyone's going to do it, it should be me. And so that lived experience I think really made a huge difference. And what we're talking about in class is that it doesn't only make a huge difference because you're serving those patients and helping them get what they need to be healthy. It also makes a difference because you're changing who participates in entrepreneurship and venture capital, who's getting funded, who gets to innovate, and that in and of itself also has such a huge social impact in terms of equity in general.

OF:

Yeah, definitely. And I love one of Ashley's sayings and one of the resources you provided was that the people closest to the problem are often the closest to the solution. So I think that goes to show the forest and bias and really uplifting those lived experiences.

TC:

And I think also zooming back out to public health in general on this really difficult moment in time, it shows that not under every circumstance, usually there are huge trade-offs between capitalism and health equity, but under certain circumstances, we are able to leverage venture capital and other frameworks and resources in our current capitalistic society to achieve health equity goals, to elevate leaders with lived experience who have ideas and solutions that should be invested in and to kind of broaden the range of players in the field of public health and health equity. And it definitely needs to be navigated with care because not everyone has the same goals and the same mission, but if you can find the right people, if you can find the right partners and investors who share your mission and who see an alignment in the value of health equity, then it is an opportunity for public health pioneers and innovators to swim rather than sink. Anything else you want to add? Just as closing thoughts about this journey and this moment in time?

OF:

I think it's a crazy journey. I mean, I feel like all of it has been said, but I mean we've gone through pretty crazy times, so I'm just very appreciative of the Yale School public health and taking a chance on admitting me, and then all the opportunities and mentors, Dr. Yoma Parra, Dr. Donya Ke, all the mentors. You as well. I mean, I have to thank you just for giving us the resources and the tools to be successful and to partner with different people and opening a safe space in a community, rather. I really appreciate the Yale School public health more than anything for the community that it bridges between many different people, many different backgrounds. We are going very different places, whether consulting or government or Kenya or Uganda, but I feel like we're all still very connected in the same goal, which is to advance health equity.

TC:

And those are the seeds you plant, right? When you invest in people, when you invest in ideas, when you create new paths and new ways of doing things and new partnerships for reaching public health goals so that when you're in a moment like 20, 25 and the years to come, you just find ways that you have different people out there using different approaches in different places to keep advancing the field forward, even under these conditions and these constraints.

OF:

Yes.

TC:

Thank you for doing this work, and thank you for coming back and sharing your journey with us. And I have a sneaky suspicion you'll be back in a few years to share even more exciting ideas and developments and maybe startups.

Teresa Chahine

I'm Teresa Chahine and you've been listening to Impact and Innovation. Subscribe to Stay tuned and follow us at T Chahine and SOM Ventures. Special thanks to the broadcast center at Yale School of Management.