Country of Residence
United States
Age
17
Project title
Project Health Start: Afro-Health Initiative
Project Summary: Describe your project in one sentence
Project Health Start, an Afro Health Initiative, bridges the gap between knowing about healthcare and actually navigating it. Being Tailored to teenagers, African families, and Immigrant/underrepresented individuals, our culturally responsive health navigators and practical appointment prep guides, help navigate, prepare , and connects people to culture-friendly clinics/healthcare resources around the DMV (Dc-Maryland-Virginia).
Website URL(s) or social media handles.
https://projecthealthstart.my.canva.site/project-health-start-an-afro-health-inititative
Project Category
My project is an existing project that I started
Project Stage
Growth (We’ve moved past the very first activities and are beginning to have consistent weekly or monthly impact)
Founding Story: What was the spark that led you to start your project? What was the "Aha!" moment that led you to get started and see the potential for this to succeed?
I thought I was only registering families for food. Instead, I began noticing how difficult it could be to navigate the systems meant to help them. While volunteering at my church’s Good Samaritan food bank, I helped register families coming in for food assistance. I met people from different cultural and immigrant, and African backgrounds and saw how paperwork & unfamiliar systems like the TEFAP/USDA and not knowing where to find information could make accessing resources more difficult. It made me wonder: if navigating one community resource could be confusing, what happens when someone has to navigate something as complicated as healthcare? I brought these observations to my friends, who shared experiences and perspectives of their own. Together, the four of us also recognized a gap among teenagers: we are told to take care of our health, but rarely taught how to prepare for appointments, understand health information, or advocate for ourselves. That became our “aha” moment: resources can exist without being truly accessible. Together, we co-founded Project Health Start to close that gap. We create practical health navigators and prep guides that turn complicated information into clear next steps. Seeing community members use our resources, ask questions, and provide feedback showed us that our idea could grow into something our communities could truly use.
The Problem: What problem are you helping to solve? Why does it matter to you and your community?
Healthcare is supposed to begin with a patient understanding their options. But what happens when understanding those options becomes a challenge of its own? For many immigrant and underserved families in the DMV, navigating healthcare involves more than finding a doctor. Unfamiliar medical terminology, language differences, confusing appointment procedures, and limited understanding of available, comfortable resources can make an already complicated system feel even more difficult to navigate. These obstacles matter because healthcare navigation is not simply about whether services exist. It is also about whether people have the information and confidence to use them. Being in a Ghanaian community/church & volunteering alongside families from different immigrant backgrounds, I became increasingly aware of how essential information can become inaccessible. Seeing my mother trying to help other family members register for Medicare, health insurance, and navigate the jargons of healthcare documents, I realized it's not only about access but transparency. Project Health Start addresses this gap in health literacy and healthcare navigation. We make sure that healthcare navigation isn't only accessible but navigable. From preparing others to understand the health field and their rights, they can be ready for any health expeditions in sports, travel, appointments, etc.
Your Solution: How are you solving this problem? Share your specific solution.
A healthcare resource is only useful if the people who need it can understand and use it. That principle became the foundation of Project Health Start. Being a student-led initiative, Project Health Start works to make healthcare information more approachable for immigrants, teens and African/underserved communities throughout the DMV. Rather than expecting families to navigate complicated medical systems independently, we create health-navigation and appointment-preparation guides that break information into clearer, more manageable steps. Our resources help individuals understand how to prepare for medical appointments, identify questions to ask healthcare providers, and locate relevant health services. We have also developed resources addressing specific health concerns, including sickle cell disease. However, our approach extends beyond distributing information. Through collaborations with community organizations such as Good Samaritan Food Bank, and Columbia Youth Association, we aim to bring these resources into spaces where families already gather and seek support. To extend our navigators and prep-guides across the DMV where healthcare navigation isn't only at a fancy hospital, but hung right on their fridge. As Co-Founder and Executive Director, I work with our student leadership team to coordinate outreach, develop resources, and build relationships with community partners. The goal is not to replace medical professionals. It is to help families, and youth approach healthcare interactions feeling more informed, prepared, and confident.
Impact: How has your project created impact / made a difference so far? Or, if at an early stage, what will impact look like?
A health guide may only be a few pages long, but its value lies in what someone feels prepared to do after reading it. Project Health Start has distributed more than 530 health-navigation and appointment-preparation resources through our outreach efforts. Working with local organizations from Howard county all the way to PG has helped us bring health information closer to the communities we hope to serve. Our survey results indicated a 35% improvement in reported health preparedness from post outreach events. Although this does not mean we have eliminated barriers to healthcare, it shows that understandable information can help individuals feel more confident navigating medical appointments. For our team, impact goes beyond the number of resources distributed. It means helping someone prepare questions for a doctor, understand the steps involved in seeking care, or discover healthcare services they might not have known existed. People at our foodbank from Hispanic to African backgrounds grew not only a sense of understanding but identity, finding not only local clinics but clinics tailored to helping people who are ignored, underrepresented, and in need. We hope to continue measuring these outcomes so our work is guided not only by how many people we reach, but by how effectively we support them.
Your Innovation: What is different about your project compared to other programs or solutions already out there? How is your project new or innovative?
What if the first step toward understanding healthcare didn't begin in a hospital, but on someone's refrigerator? Healthcare information already exists, but much of it is buried within medical websites, complicated documents, and unfamiliar terminology. We, Project Health Start plan to approach this challenge differently: instead of waiting for individuals to seek out information, we bring understandable healthcare resources directly into the communities where they live, learn, and gather. Our innovation is not the invention of a new medical technology, but the reimagining of healthcare navigation as something accessible, practical, and community centered. Through our student-developed health navigators and appointment-preparation guides, we translate complicated healthcare processes into efficient steps. These resources are designed to help people prepare for medical appointments, understand their options, and identify relevant services without feeling overwhelmed by the medical jargon. What also distinguishes our approach is our emphasis on reaching immigrant families, African communities, and young people through familiar community spaces. By collaborating with local organizations across the DMV, we move health education beyond traditional clinical settings and into places where trust and relationships already exist. As young people ourselves, we also recognize that health literacy should begin before adulthood, not only when someone faces a medical emergency. We want healthcare navigation to become part of everyday life: something understandable enough to discuss with family, share with a neighbor, or keep on the refrigerator for the next appointment.
How many people are on your team?
5
Your team: What role(s) do your team members play? How do you share leadership with them?
Our team is comprised of 5 members: I, Dave Sarpong, serve as Executive Director; Elena Nagbe oversees operations; Ivan Lawal leads community outreach; Kenzie Narh directs communications and presentations; and Christel Annan coordinates event outreach. We collaborate on major decisions, divide responsibilities based on our strengths, and hold each other accountable, ensuring every member contributes to Project Health Start's mission.
What’s Next: What are the next steps you plan to take to grow or strengthen your project over the next year? If your project is still in the idea stage, describe the steps you will take over the next three months to launch or begin developing it.
What if healthcare preparedness could become part of the support families receive when beginning a new life in America? Over the next year, Project Health Start hopes to expand its reach by pursuing a partnership with the Immigrant and Refugee Outreach Center (IROC), an organization supporting newly arrived families throughout the DMV. Through this potential collaboration, we hope to distribute health navigators and appointment-preparation guides that help families understand health insurance, locate healthcare services, and prepare for medical visits. We also plan to partner with teen-focused organizations across the DMV to introduce healthcare literacy earlier in life. Through youth-led workshops and interactive presentations, we want teenagers to understand their healthcare rights, ask informed questions, and confidently navigate medical appointments. Alongside strengthening our existing community partnerships, we hope to expand our resources on sickle cell disease and preventive care while making materials more accessible across language barriers. Last but not least, we plan to strengthen our surveys to measure changes in healthcare preparedness and use community feedback to strengthen our work. Our vision is to make healthcare navigation a resource families can carry with them, rather than a system they must struggle to understand alone.
How do you encourage other people to join your project or learn about the problem you’re working on? If you have a new idea, tell us how you will do this in the future.
They say that young people have to wait until adulthood to make a difference in healthcare, so they say. At Project Health Start, youth are not simply the next generation of changemakers, we are changemakers now. As students at Hammond High School, our team uses our shared experiences and connections to African immigrant communities to encourage other young people to recognize healthcare accessibility as an issue that affects their own families and neighborhoods. Through our school and community networks, we raise awareness about health navigation and encourage students to contribute their creativity, cultural perspectives, and communication skills to our mission. Whether through developing educational resources, sharing information, or supporting outreach, we want students to recognize that meaningful health advocacy does not require a medical degree. Beyond our school, our collaborations with Good Samaritan Food Bank and Columbia Youth Association have helped us engage families across Howard and Prince George's counties. As we grow, we hope to involve more Hammond students and African youth in workshops, outreach events, and resource development. We only have one simple message: young people shouldn't have to wait to become healthcare professionals to help make healthcare more transparent.
