| UNC-CH
mpower
Interview with founders Snigdha Peddireddy and Gretchen Mason
Q & A
Our team wants to address two key issues that we’ve identified through conversations with community members living with multiple chronic illnesses: 1) lack of peer support and 2) a lack of awareness of existing and relevant community resources. Some of these resources include access to physical, emotional, and financial support to ease daily burdens associated with having multiple chronic illnesses.
We feel compelled to address this issue because of our professional and personal backgrounds. Not only are we public health graduate students, but we also have our own lived experiences with chronic illness. Because of this, we are aware of barriers that reinforce social isolation and poor health outcomes among individuals with MCIs. We are passionate about building a solution that creates structural change to meet the needs of this community.
CUBE provides a platform for us to challenge our ideas and assumptions alongside our peers. CUBE also offers a space to translate ideas into real-world practice. By participating in CUBE, we hope to learn how to be responsible innovators and build on relationships we have begun with individuals living with chronic illness in the area. We believe social ventures should be community-based and engage stakeholders at every step of the process. We are especially interested in CUBE programming because of its strong emphasis on involving community in the process of innovation
As a CUBE 6.0 venture, we believe we will have the tools necessary to make our venture community-based and one that involves individuals impacted by chronic illness at every stage of development. Additionally, being part of a formal incubator will help us streamline our efforts in order to create a viable product in a short period of time. During our residency, our goal is to create a testable prototype and refine our business model.
Unlike current platforms for those living with chronic illness, our venture centers on the lived experiences of users. We hope to incorporate first-hand knowledge from those living with chronic illness by having peer mentors provide accessible health information as well as information on local, relevant community resources. A solution like mPOWER is poised to create systems-level change for people living with multiple forms of chronic illness. We believe our venture is unique because our co-leaders are community members most impacted by chronic illness who will continue to be involved throughout ideation and implementation.
We are motivated to be student entrepreneurs because we are passionate about directly applying the skills we are gaining in our public health graduate program to tackle real-world solutions. We have already used techniques we have learned in our community-based participatory research and qualitative methods coursework to make sure our efforts are not only innovative but are evidence-based. We want to hold ourselves to the highest standards for our community partners and want to create a solution that meets individuals where they are. We believe that public health solutions should not live within the walls of the academy and are passionate about sharing our co-created solution with others in the community.