Building Global Communities
And an Uber for Ambulances
Hi Friends,
I’m so excited to join the Write of Passage (WOP) Mentor team this October.
A wise mentor of mine suggested I take WOP before building my next venture. The advice surprised me - a writing class as a foundation of entrepreneurship? But I now understand that writing is a superpower when building.
Taking WOP last year helped me turn anger into insights about what’s broken in the systems I encounter – from corruption in vaccine supply chains to environments that aren’t designed to promote vitality. The anger to insight process fosters creativity, and I want to show others how writing can help launch a wide range of businesses, not just those that are directly related to writing.
In my mentor sessions this fall, I’ll be talking about finding your voice by engaging with writing feedback, leveraging your articles to reach your goals, and building a writing community as an essential foundation to your writing practice.
But really, I joined the mentor team to focus on building our global community.
International vs. Global
My journey into the mentor program started with this thought:
A community that can be accessed from anywhere isn’t necessarily accessible to everyone equally.
My first WOP experience was awesome.
A whirlwind of live zoom events to drop into, learn from, and connect with smart people. I left with a personal website, this newsletter, and a strong accountability group to talk about writing craft, ideas, struggles and small wins. The Write of Passage coursework gave me the foundation to be a writer, but the community kept me honest and kept me publishing.
And then I moved to London and the community that I had come to rely on started to slip away from me.
I’m leading some work around WOP Global — our effort to make sure that everyone, no matter where you live, can be a full participant in this awesome community. Check out my short essay on the juggling act involved in balancing priorities to be global.
Innovation Spotlight
Last week I wrote about my work building the healthcare curriculum for the African Healthcare Funders Forum.
The first session I’m designing is about Serving Rural Africa.
Usually this topic sparks conversation on telemedicine apps or AI assisted symptom checkers. I get the excitement. I even helped build a telemedicine business in Kenya that is serving >1,000 patients monthly. But I’ve also written before about how ‘leapfrogging’ in healthcare is going to take a lot more than putting doctors on the phone.
What about the scary side of healthcare- what about when things go wrong?
I met my friend Maria in Shanghai in 2011, where we both studied Rapid Urbanisation through an NYU summer program. Within five years, we were both building health tech businesses in Kenya.
Maria’s startup has been dubbed the “Uber for Ambulances.” Her company Flare has a product that lets you call for emergency response support, and if you have the app, watch as help comes your way.
More importantly, Flare’s innovation is to aggregate all emergency response providers onto one platform. This reduces response times and ensures that the right vehicle with the right equipment is dispatched.
Initially focused in Nairobi, their platform has a unique role in improving rural healthcare. When resources are spread out and scarce, making sure that patients go to the right place is even more important. Flare has mapped in intricate detail the facilities in Kenya’s Western Province: the equipment each one has, the specialists who work there, and their hours. They’ve currently helped hundreds of rural patients access care through their partnership with local government, hospitals and funders in Western Kenya.
As much as I want a health system that focuses first on prevention and building vitality into the design of our communities, it is just as important to make sure that smart infrastructure is there for us when the unexpected happens.
I’ll be interviewing Maria on October 5th when we kick-off our Funders Forum. I hope some of you join us!
Thanks so much for being here!
I’d love to hear your experiences building or participating in global communities. What worked? What’s next?
Happy building,
Melissa
Amazing that you’re leading a WOP Global initiative, Melissa! Really excited for students to benefit from this.
Emergency services is something that's top of my mind for me. Since my wife and I often go hiking in remote areas and our lifeline is the Garmin InReach, a satellite messenger service to local emergency providers. And growing up in Indonesia I remember that there are just no...expectations of anyone being available to help if anything goes down. So as much as we complain about expensive ambulance services in the US, the fact that someone will come to your place and help you out is a miracle. I'm glad Maria is doing so much to help others!