How Businesses Can Thrive and Contribute Good to the World (At The Same Time)
There are now 45 million borrowers who collectively owe nearly $1.6 trillion in student loan debt in the U.S. This makes student loan debt the second-highest consumer debt category, behind only mortgage debt, and higher than both credit cards and auto loans. American women hold two-thirds of the overall national student debt and Black women finish their undergraduate education with more debt than all other graduates. I am one of these women — and I know too well about the challenges it can present throughout your adult life.
In 2016, I received a $20,000 hospital bill for premature labor on top of paying my six-figure medical school loan debt. It was devastating. I knew something had to change and that I had to be critically involved in that change. I put my energy into finding a solution to a problem that impacts not only myself but millions of people across the country. Two years later, I, with two other Black-women doctors, founded Shared Harvest to provide an opportunity for talented people to volunteer away their student loans and improve their mental health. It’s a win-win by encouraging borrowers to do social good while offering businesses and organizations a valuable way to impact company culture and amplify social responsibility across their workforce.
Then 2020 presented a new set of challenges, not only for startup founders but the entire nation. The need for access to free COVID testing and telehealth services has been in unprecedented high demand, with hundreds of people looking to get tested and minority communities lacking access entirely, it was only a matter of time before we would see the consequences of systemic inequalities in public health play out in the devastating mortality rates among communities most disenfranchised. As a Black physician, I couldn’t sit back and watch the real-time numbers stream in showing Black and Brown communities dying at the highest rates. It all came down to a lack of access and resources. History had prepared me to know better than to assume a solution would be forthcoming, I had to become part of the movement to save ourselves. Hence, my co-founders and I turned around the volunteer matching technology from Shared Harvest to create myCovidMD™, an empathy-derived telehealth platform that helps under-resourced communities get free testing, free quarantine support, and access to free telehealth providers and services during the coronavirus public health crisis.
As the founder and CEO of Shared Harvest and the myCovidMD™ initiative, my focus has been building empathy-driven technology to scale; technology with a human touch and feel from start to finish. We were able to position ourselves as the tactical solution to a failing public health response in communities where distrust was rampant and required culturally competent humans connections to break barriers. Through this process, I’ve learned you can do good and do well at the same time. COVID-19 allowed us to transform an obstacle into an opportunity that has had rippling social impact and has changed the landscape of how communities can mobilize their people-power for rapid emergency response.
Take Inventory of Both Your Internal & External Resources
One of the most important things you can do is take an inventory of both your internal and external resources. Recognize early on that you are never going to be successful on your own — no one is self-made. That doesn’t exist. Each connection you make can open doors to an entire network. When my team and I weren’t sure what to do without funding, I called a Google for Startups mentor who opened the doors to floodgates of resources. Our first seed funding investor was introduced to us by a Google mentor, and wouldn’t have been possible without the right foundational network. We also have relationships to thank for our non-dilutive cash award from Google for Startups Black Founders Fund and support from The Ballmer Group. Networking and building mentors are part of giving and taking; it’s important to be a part of a broader ecosystem where sometimes you give and sometimes you get.
Align Your Innovation Efforts with Your Culture
Both of my businesses were born out of the urgent and crucial need to solve a real-world problem that impacted not only me but millions of others. If you’re trying to reach your customers, remember that you *are* the customer. It’s essential to ensure your leadership and board represent the customers that you are trying to reach. Don’t hypothesize about who the outside customer is, because it is really not enough to survey people. Experience is everything. Now more than ever, innovation has to be aligned with culture. To build inclusive and empathetic technology, start with your own organization. For example, Pacific Islanders were dying at the highest rates from COVID in Los Angeles. In order to realize this, it started with our organization being inclusive and reaching out to a community in Long Beach. That inclusive behavior brought attention to an issue that we were unaware of and allowed us to shed light on the need in an authentic and productive way where no one else was addressing this problem.
If you do not have an inclusive culture embedded in your organization, then it is impossible to create empathetic technology for your customers.
Put Humans Before the Technology
The pandemic has illuminated the technical divide in the U.S. 19 million Americans and almost half of the world’s population do not have access to Wi-Fi. With Shared Harvest | myCovidMD™, we help our customers get acquainted with the technology, and offer community-based solutions for our customers that may not have access to the internet. The key to building empathy-driven technology is remembering to not take the community out of the solution. Human interaction is the core. Understanding the barriers to access, and how your customer stacks up priorities, will better inform how to make your technology inclusive for customers who may not be as familiar with technology. Tech empowers us to grow our business, but we can’t really scale without the ability to truly help our customers and community. We must bring them along, at their pace, hearing the stories, and transforming as we go.
Embrace Failure
Part of a founder’s journey is being so curious about the problem they’re solving that they’re not afraid to fail. It’s just as important to learn what doesn’t work as what does — and to build up your muscle memory to keep trying. We failed several times in our initial iteration of the Shared Harvest volunteer management & fintech platform. We were told it was too complicated, not sticky enough, but we knew the problem we wanted to solve was complicated so we leaned in on who our customers were and what they wanted more of. By the time COVID hit we were not afraid of failing — and our customers trusted us enough not to jump ship when we were ready to pivot. Some became die-hard fans promoting us along the way. They embraced our philosophy and company culture of giving and listening to feedback. We were able to pivot quickly and take advantage of the opportunity because of our loyal base and alignment with social good that was already a part of our genuine culture. We were a trusted brand in the midst of a lot of distrust. I don’t take that lightly, the confidence our customers had in us to deliver even with the challenges ahead.
My advice is to trust the process of picking yourself back up and never stop believing in your vision. Before you know it, others have drunk the kool-aid too!
