What have been your most significant leadership experiences? What challenges did you face, and what impact did you have? This is your opportunity to explain how you Think Bravely (personally and/or professionally).

Six months ago, a mumps epidemic broke out in the remote Chinese village school that I volunteered. Forty out of the fifty kids in the school were affected. For weeks, four other volunteers and I accompanied the sickest children to the nearest medical provider, fed the healthy ones preventive medicine, and disinfected the whole school with chlorine while tutoring children individually at their homes to make up for missed classes.

This unfortunate incident could have been prevented by routine inoculation per national standard. However, inoculation has never been standardized in the remote Chinese country sides due to the prohibitive cost and lack of access to medical facilities. After experiencing the effects of the epidemic and knowing the benefits of vaccination, I was determined to establish a standardized inoculation process for all volunteering schools.

To establish the program, first I needed the support from student parents. The number one issue for the families was the vaccination costs. Although personal finance related topics were usually a sensitive issue in rural China, I took the opportunity to start the conversion with the parents as I tutored their kids at home. Initially, I simply floated the idea of preventive inoculation in front of their families and gauged the families’ interest. Through casual conversations, I uncovered how much the families would realistically be willing to spend. Then I built cost estimates for transportation, doctor visits and other costs associated with retroactive care as I accompanied the sick children to the clinic. By highlighting the difference in costs between retroactive care and the vaccines to the families, the idea of preventative vaccinations became a welcoming change for the parents.

Aside from winning the support from the villagers, execution of the program was another challenge. Since the volunteering organization lacked medical expertise, effective cooperation with local healthcare professionals was the key. After obtaining preliminary board approval, I worked with a team of volunteers from different schools to contact local medical providers. By communicating the necessity of inoculation in the villages and potential revenue that cooperation with us could bring, we were able to convince the local providers to visit each volunteering school semi-annually and negotiate bulk pricing for the vaccines. Also, per discussion with the medical professionals, we created easy-to-follow sanitary guidelines and training for future volunteers to prepare for every inoculation visit. In the meanwhile, I recruited another volunteer with a computer science background to create a database, keeping track of costs and vaccination histories for all the kids.

Within three months, all 2nd graders in our volunteering schools have received their first rounds of encephalitis vaccine. Additional inoculation for TB and MMR will follow next fall. For the first time in seven years since the volunteering organization was founded, we are rolling out the program to have every child in school inoculated per national standard.