Education as Driver of Economic Development

In our bonus final episode this season we meet Elizabeth Gore, co-founder and President of Hello Alice, a fintech company that helps small businesses access capital and growth. Elizabeth shares her journey as an entrepreneur launching this company against all odds, and how she navigated barriers in building it. After 200+ rejections, she and her co-founder found the investors who believed in them, and since then have served 1.5M+ entrepreneurs! She focuses on serving women and people of color along with veterans, who receive the least amount of funding and support. The data shows that when they do receive funding, women outperform men. So Elizabeth is out to change the access gap. She shares that, while the entrepreneurship ecosystem buzz is largely around venture capital and unicorns, small businesses make up 90% of businesses in the U.S. and are the largest providers of jobs. Hello Alice is out to support these businesses through director service and advocacy. If you like this episode, check out Elizabeth's show "The Big Idea" on Yahoo! Finance.

After many years of zooming in to my class, Rod Bremby is finally here in person! Former health secretary for the state of Kansas, commissioner of the department of social services for Connecticut, and vice president of digital transformation for the global public sector at Salesforce; Rod shares his reflections on the revolving door of public and private sector work. He was fired for turning down a coal fired power plant in Kanses, received an award for taking CT SNAP "from worst to first" through his unique change management approach, and led the Salesforce public private partnerships for multiple states and nations during COVID-19. Most recently his work centers on how AI can help drive impact at scale by freeing up health and social workers to spend more time coaching their patients and customers to succes. Rod shares his advice on standing up for what you believe in, and finding ways to help bend the arc of justice. 

Yaw Owusu-Boahen returns to SOM to share his experience after graduating, and his most recent role as Director of the CT Wealth Accelerator, an extrapreneurship endeavor bringing together multiple partners who are deeply invested in bridging the racial wealth gap in CT. Building on a government innovation providing "baby bonds" to children born under the poverty line, the Wealth Accelerator is testing new programs to support customers in leveraging existing resources to build generational wealth. He shares his ambitions for accelerating existing results, and the need to take risks to do so. 

They're back again! After visiting my podcast in its first year in 2018, Khushi Baby is back to share how they've not only survived the past seven years but completely leaned into their mission and expanded the depth and magnitude of their impact. Founded just over ten years ago, KB started out as a wearable designed to digitize data on childhood immunization in rural India. After conducting field research with Community Health Workers, they created an app integrating the maternal child health challenge into the larger problem set of primary care. Scaling rapidly in response to government crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic, they became part of a growing ecosystem of apps serving the public health system. KB2.0 emerged from this digital boom and the wealth of data generated, to play a new and critical role in helping the government generate insights from this data, and translate those insights into policy. 

Now is the time when we find out to what degree and how we will swim rather than sink, as public health innovators and practitioners. In this episode, I talk to my former student Olivia Francis, who obtained her MPH in 2025. Like many of her peers, Olivia is navigating the turbulent waters of the political storm surrounding public health. She reflects on past public health challenges and how we overcame them. "How can we make this an opportunity," she asks, "rather than just a sad time that happened?" Last spring Olivia was recruited by Health in Her Hue, following founder Ashlee Wisdom's visit to my class. Health in Her Hue is a venture backed start-up working to build trust between Black women and their health care providers. We discuss the range of possibilities available to us in keeping public health and health equity alive under attack, using unconventional methods and imperfect allies. 

Ivelyse Andino founded Radical Health as the first public benefit corporation in New York state, to build community around health. After navigating the health care system on her own to help support her immigrant mother through cancer, and later through her own pregnancy, Ivelyse realized how isolated most people feel when dealing with health services. Radical Health began with indigenous circle practices to build community around health; and evolved into health worker training to enhance the health care workforce. Ivelyse began her career building apps for digital health, and started Radical Health to apply those technologies to equip and empower disenfranchised patients and their families, rather than keep them out.

To what degree and how are current capitalistic structures conducive to reaching public health goals? Sofia Noori shares her journey from grassroots organizing to clinical training in psychiatry, to raising $19 in venture capital for her tech enabled platform, Nema Health. Nema is an online clinic providing intensive care for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Utilizing a value-based care model to improve health outcomes and reduce long term costs, Sofia and her team secured national contracts with health care payers to provide trauma focused therapy that helps survivors heal and "graduate" from their care. She shares the key to designing her company in a way that the incentives of patients, providers, and payers are aligned to achieve improved patient experiences, health outcomes, and cost of care.

Victoria Bush '23 is passionate about "intrapreneurship:" the idea of innovating within existing institutions. Utilizing her entrepreneurial spirit and skills to improve any organization she is part of, she developed the 3C's framework of Constrain, Create, Champion, to help structure internal innovation. Hear why constraints help creativity, and how to champion change in your organization. Victoria shares examples of intrapreneurship, and leaves us with the motivation to leave each place a little bit better than we found it.

Josh Trautwein, founder of About Fresh, shares his start-up journey in the food as medicine space. Josh started out as a Community Health Worker, helping patients access the things they need to be healthy. He realized the importance of accessing healthy food, in a culturally relevant way, especially for urban areas without fresh food at accessible prices. The concept of "food as medicine" entails utilizing health care dollars to reimburse for fresh produce in a similar way to reimbursing for medication. Many chronic diseases are related to the food we eat, and health care payers like Medicaid can achieve better health outcomes and lower costs if they support patients in accessing healthy food, rather than long term medication. Learn about Josh's roller coaster ride as he navigated this space, starting with a school bus selling fresh produce, and evolving to a scalable fintech solution.

Tagan Engel reflects on different changemaking paths available to each of us. Her own path led her to follow her heart into the kitchen, where she applied her social justice work to food systems. In this episode, she shares the various roles she has played as a chef, educator, activist, and innovator. We discuss food as a driver of health, and as a human right.