Teresa Chahine

While social entrepreneurs are often criticized for building parallel systems alongside public institutions, writes Yale SOM’s Teresa Chahine, in the case of public health they can serve as a pathway to strengthen and complement the existing public health system, especially in low-resource settings.

Professor Teresa Chahine talks with Roderick Bremby, who led a dramatic turnaround of Connecticut's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Today, he is an executive at Salesforce, which has provided contact tracing and vaccine management during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Despite being easy and inexpensive to treat, a group of common bacterial and parasitic infections kill hundreds of thousands of people in tropical countries each year. In a new paper, Yale SOM’s Teresa Chahine and her co-authors map the complex system of stakeholders surrounding the diseases and identify key leverage points for making progress. 

We asked Teresa Chahine, an expert in social entrepreneurship and public health, how philanthropies and donors can respond to the turmoil caused by COVID-19 while keeping their long-term goals in mind.