Skoll Scholar 2009/10
Born and raised in the Middle East, Lara Vogel comes naturally by the international perspective she brings to her work. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Lara studied Human Biology, with a concentration in International Public Health. After college, Lara worked as a freelance travel writer, jumping across four continents while focusing primarily on clinical health work in the developing world. Eventually, she ended up in Kenya, where she began the non-profit organization Hope Runs (www.HopeRuns.org).
Hope Runs uses running programs as a community builder in orphanages before expanding into vocational and educational support with an ultimate goal of helping the graduates of the orphanage enter easily into gainful employment and productive citizenship within their communities. After an extended stay of eight months in the orphanage in Nyeri, Kenya that was Hope Runs’ pilot site, Lara returned to school in preparation for a medical degree.
Lara is pursuing her MBA at Oxford before beginning at Stanford Medical School to further pursue her interests in International Public Health. Intent on designing methods for improving health systems in developing nations, Lara notes that most public health work fails not because of a lack of medical understanding but because of a limitation of business resources and management. This seems to be particularly true in Sub-Saharan Africa and the cities of India, where Lara intends to focus her public health career. Therefore, she has joined the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship as a means of learning more about the business aspects of public health, and in search of opportunities to learn more about the developing field of global health.
Committed to the mission of Hope Runs, and the homes in which it works, Lara is also using this year as a time for strengthening the foundation of the organisation in order to guarantee its sustainability and impact into the future.