Balma Health: Our Story
As co-founders, we’ve always been engaged with and focused on healthcare inequity. Coming from a family of Latino immigrants and having lived in numerous countries throughout the world, we witnessed the vast disparities present in both healthcare and education. Striving to learn more about these ever-present issues in the United States, we’ve worked in various educator positions and conducted research investigating inequities in treatment and diagnosis throughout healthcare for many years. Now, with the toll caused by the pandemic, we’re even more driven to bridge these gaps in the social side of healthcare.
We founded Project Empower, a non-profit organization, in 2018 as an initiative toward providing STEM opportunities for underrepresented elementary, middle, and high school students in disadvantaged schools. Through the development of creative curriculum and after-school programs, Project Empower inspired and entertained hundreds of young students. As the COVID-19 pandemic thwarted learning opportunities, Project Empower facilitated the development of STEM boxes containing inquisitive, small-scale experiments designed to teach foundational scientific topics. Moreover, the feedback received from parents utilizing these STEM boxes signaled a growing need for not only continued educational tools for science, but also one to aid in the explanation of COVID-19 and illnesses as a whole.
Motivated by this need, Project Empower designed a COVID-19 Lung Kit aiming to facilitate a healthy learning environment where a child could learn about COVID-19 on both the fronts of science and public health. From our previous experiences, we recognized the value of autonomous and student-focused learning, sparking the foundation for our kit as a tool where the child would be at the forefront and actively learning through do-it-yourself models. The COVID-19 Kit grew into a widely successful learning tool, with over 500 kits ordered, nationwide media coverage, and remarkable feedback from both parents and children.
One kindergarten teacher said the COVID-19 Kit “brought the concept to life and understanding” where the students could “see, hear, touch, and smell it,” thus providing an environment where “students could learn best.” Stemming from the feedback we received from users of the COVID-19 Kit, especially those who previously had COVID-19 or watched a family member cope with the disease, we saw the potential for similar autonomous learning models for use in teaching children about other illnesses.
This idea was realized in the creation of Balma Health, a company devoted to improving children’s understandings of chronic illnesses through the development of do-it-yourself public health education tools similar to the Project Empower COVID-19 Kit. From conversing with various physicians, child life specialists, and educators, we realized the lack of educational tools for young children facing difficult chronic disease diagnoses. Not only are children diagnosed with these illnesses often left with a severe lack of understanding regarding the illness, but professionals involved in the diagnostic and treatment process are also equipped with limited tools to facilitate these processes. Furthermore, conversations pertaining to these health topics are often difficult, confusing, and overwhelming for children, exacerbating the lack of tools that would place the child in a position of control and empowerment.
Currently, we at Balma Health are working on the development of a Type 1 Diabetes Kit, seeking to improve the educational gaps in one of the most prevalent chronic diseases. In the future, we hope to continue creating kits for the numerous chronic diseases plaguing over 15 million children and adults in the United States.
Thank you for your time! If you are interested in the mission of Balma Health or would like to learn more to support our efforts, please visit us at balmahealth.com!
