(Sayre, West Philadelphia) What I hope to change in time by applying my creativity, people skills, leadership and dedication

I finally managed to get my Sayre project started. I am really excited about this project as I will be working with Sayre high school in impoverished West Philadelphia to set up the first sustainable community-based health center in America. This will be achieved through creatively integrating the health objectives of the center with the educational and research goals of both Penn and the high school. The health center will also act as the social glue rebuilding community spirit in West Philly by bringing people to the school. This project has grants worth over a million dollars and will be exciting and challenging for me to work on it. Most importantly, I hope to create a template which can be applied to the problems of urban health elsewhere.

Working on a real world problem has both its joys and frustration. In order to get the project started, I had to push through a complicated bureaucracy with differing interests from different constituencies. I contacted the person nominally in charge of the project, who referred me to another person who in turn referred me to yet another person. After several meetings, I managed to persuade several decision makers to allow me to carry out the project. Implementation risks remain as some of the health center staff might not share the same objectives in pushing the edge in health center design and integration with the community, as this would involve a radical rethink of their role in the health center.

In addition to the people I will work with at Sayre High, the Penn Center for Community Partnership and the Penn Medical School in implementing the project, I also managed to recruit a friend, Jeremy, from the Wharton School to help out. He is a really enthusiastic and smart person with great ideas. I enjoy working with him on my mgmt 100 project to create a tour template at a historic cemetery and look forward to working with him on this project.

In a way, I see this as a continuation of the project which I created and presented at the World Bank Annual Meet on Development. That project stressed social entrepreneurship in creating new solutions and new perspectives on problems to achieve breakthrough results, which is what I hoped to accomplish on this activity.