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Pat Christen - Kenya
Pat Christen, Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya (1982-1985), is the President of HopeLab in Palo Alto, California, a non-profit corporation dedicated to creating and rigorously testing innovative solutions to help young people with chronic illness.
Interview with Pat Christen, President of HopeLab in California.
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A graduate of Stanford University, Pat Christen was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya, an experience that has supported her passion for practical problem solving. She was President of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) for 15 years, and also served as President of the Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation, the international affiliate of SFAF. In this role, she played an active role in national AIDS planning efforts in Rwanda, South Africa, and China.
She is now the President of HopeLab, which has developed, tested and launched its first product, Remission, a video game that helps kids and young adults with cancer take their chemotherapy and their antibiotics more consistently and develop a strong sense of control over their disease. Pat is currently directing development and research of other technologies to address obesity and sickle cell disease as well as continue HopeLab’s work in cancer.
In this interview, she says that she is not a technologist, but that she sees technology as a practical way to solve problems to make people's lives better. She is inspired to work with young adults and adolescents with chronic diseases because people in these age groups often fall through the medical and research cracks. It is assumed that they are old enough to take care of themselves and their healing –which is rarely the case.
Pat considers herself a social innovator. She is continually looking for ways to improve alleviate suffering and improve lives and, to that end, she puts her curiosity and the ability to improve systems and processes to work.
Pat advises social entrepreneurs to do their homework, to build a factual, data-informed foundation under their dreams. They should be open to changing their mental models when their research turns up facts that do not conform to their beliefs.
“As an entrepreneur, you may find things that are contrary to your thinking, and you should remain flexible, informed and eager to unearth those contrary insights. Doing so will improve the likelihood of success.”
CLICK on the player above to listen to her interview.
other ideas
would love to see other ideas for social technologies. post them to my blog at socialedge.org. patrick o'heffernan