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The water purification system Implemented in Guyana by Health Goes Global
“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” - Ryunosuke Satoro
First-year COM student, Hannah Akre, COM ‘23, recalls the moment in high school, when a small, fledgling idea took root; an idea that would soon soar to become a worldwide phenomenon. “I was in high school and just started doing this project to collect gloves from universities,” she says. “I reached out to some veterinary clinics… I later came to find that hospitals, when they switch insurance companies, will wipe all products on the floor and replace them with whatever brand that insurance company backs… all these strange loopholes with a lot of waste.” For Hannah, the idea was simple: collect unused gloves for communities in need to aid in sanitation, safety and other preventative measures. According to Hannah, gloves were a manageable project. “I'd been doing some volunteer work in Kenya, and I noticed an overwhelming need. But I said, what is manageable? Medicines and machinery can get caught up in Customs, and might never make it. There's a lot of lot of blocks, but something that has no expiration date, and you’re just sending a box, that's one thing, so it will make it through really quickly.”
Her trip to Kenya with the Outreach Foundation gave her the experience of working with global communities and clinics abroad. What started as a small, manageable venture expanded over the next six years as Hannah and her colleagues added more clinics and projects to their plates. It was during this time that she witnessed some alternative outcomes to the work they were doing, which sparked another plan of action: “The realization of working with underserved populations is that you give them a product sometimes, and you come to find out they're selling it, because in their eyes they need something else. How can we best work together and understand the needs, and then find clinics that are going to uphold our mission? It was a greater problem that started a greater view that these people need more.”