News

By the time she graduated from college, Grace Garey, now 25, had worked in a Liberian refugee camp and helped coordinate emergency response for war-torn countries at a humanitarian organization in Washington, D.C. While she loved solving problems in international development, she felt frustrated by the bureaucracy. “I came away from those experiences thinking, There must be a more creative way to make health care accessible to every person on the planet,” she says. So Garey cofounded Watsi, a global crowdfunded platform that connects donors directly with individual patients in the developing world. The nonprofit, which recently celebrated its third anniversary, has already raised $5 million for more than 5,000 patients in 20 countries. “You can scroll through stories on the site,” she explains, “and read about a single mother in Kenya who overcame cancer because 30 strangers funded her treatment.” Watsi is also radically transparent, publicly updating all its finances in real time. Says Garey, “I think this is the future of health care.”

Read the article here.