As the South recovers from Hurricane Helene and prepares for Milton, a nonprofit medical supply company in New York, is getting ready to help with relief efforts.
WSHU’s Molly Ingram spoke with Danielle Butin, the founder of the Afya Foundation, about how they’ve helped divert perfectly good medical supplies from landfills for over 15 years.
WSHU: I want to start at the beginning. Tell me about your 2007 trip to Tanzania and how it inspired your company.
DB: So I had left an executive position in healthcare, and I went on vacation, and I really had no idea what would be next. And while I was in the Serengeti plains, it became very clear a woman was crying alone in a tent with a glass of wine in her hand, sobbing. And I walked up to her and said, what's happening here? And are you okay? And she said I'm not okay. I am a women's health doctor in London. I have come here to do medical mission work. There are no medical supplies anywhere. I'm watching children die, I know how to treat them, but I have nothing to help people recover.
And it was one of those moments, and we all have these moments, where you hear the story of another and you have this big compassionate response, but this was, you have to do something. You have to do something about this, not in a grand way, but in a very practical way, there has to be a solution here that I can take on. And I'd worked in health care my entire life, so I came home to New York, I walked uninvited through the waste management tunnels of the biggest and best hospitals of New York. Everyone is screaming, lady, what are you doing in our garbage? And I wasn't in the blood-borne, contaminated garbage. I was in the laundry bins of, you know, still wrapped, sterile, not expired, IV solutions and IV starter kits.
And I asked the guys there what this was. And why is this here? And they said because, in the United States, we are the only nation that, if medical supplies are exposed to the patient, it has to be discarded in operating rooms, inpatient rooms, in ERs, you open a pack, you use two things, the rest has to be discarded. And this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity. This stuff should not be burned. When you look at the needs abroad, it is extraordinary. So, I named the work “Afya.” It means health in the Kiswahili language. It is my heart's hat tip to the land that whispered the work. And that was the launch of Afya.
WSHU: How many hospitals do you get donations from today?
DB: So today, most of the hospitals in the greater New York area have donated to us at least once. Some of the hospitals are steady donors, and we have a systematic process with them, but we are launching a coalition. So what we are launching is a movement in New York to invite all of the health systems, nursing homes, hospitals, home care, and urgent care centers to see Afya as a green solution so that we can create a coalition that is throughout the New York area committed to doing something really extraordinary with these supplies, and being the first city in the United States where that is an effort that all have a hand in.
WSHU: How do you decide who needs the supplies? Do people reach out to you?
DB: So we vet our partners really carefully, because this is an enormous amount of work. Supplies come into Afya, for example, in bags or boxes, and it's all mixed products. So we need thousands of volunteers to help us. One, to make sure we send nothing that has expired. Two, to ensure every box is sent with respect and dignity. So, I'm not going to have a pediatric surgeon in Sub-Saharan Africa rummage through a box to find a pediatric extent for a cardiac operation. So what we do is we vet our partners carefully. We ask them what they need, and we only deliver that.
Afya’s model is about strengthening the health care system that remains. We're not flying everyone in to save the day, that's the strength of others, but we are very aware of the fact that people working chronically in under-resourced health settings, the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, now, Ukraine, during this war, are at risk for leaving, because it can just be demoralizing not to be able to do the work you're trained to do if you don't have the supplies, just like that woman I met in the Serengeti plains. So we want to help people stay, and we want to keep them well stocked.
So we are doing health system strengthening work in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the Caribbean, we have steady partners. We want to give them ongoing access to supplies. After COVID-19, we could not abandon ship for the work we were doing in New York with community safety net programs, federally qualified health centers that needed more supplies, and Title One school nurses who don't have privacy screens when kids are sick or don't have medical refrigerators to store their children's medications.
We had to really entrench ourselves in the New York area and continue to be a place where New York providers could turn to us in the community, and we could offer them support. And finally, we do a lot during disasters. I mean, we are now responding to Hurricane Helene sites. We're doing huge work there, and we have a category five coming in that is going to require even more work that is hurricane-related.
WSHU: How successful have you been with this? How much have you donated?
DB: So we have, since the beginning, we have shipped over 16 million pounds of donated supplies. Its value is $63 million in supplies. We've sent to 87 nations and 23 states. And you know what I really love about this work is that it gives folks who are often unheard and unseen a place to go. And so the work we've done in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, there are practitioners on the front line who know we've got their back, and there isn't anything they can't ask us for that we're not going to figure out how to get it in their hands really fast. And I think that's really, I think that's critically important in helping people to stay and do the work they're trained to do.
WSHU: Another aspect of this is that you're diverting this stuff from landfill, from being thrown out. Can you talk a little bit about that as well?
DB: Yes. So it's such an interesting piece for me that I feel like these supplies, by the time they arrive, are priceless. They're priceless because they have been rescued from unnecessary incineration, and they can be the solution for a terrible wound that needs dressing that otherwise would have had nothing. However, thousands of volunteers lend their time, hearts, and hands to this work and help us prepare. Hundreds of those volunteers are coming to us through day treatment programs for people with autism and IDD and long-term mental health issues, and people who were helping with sorting programs in our local county jail.
Everyone has this opportunity for altruism, and it works, and it's gorgeous, but all of these moments lead to this extraordinary delivery of supplies that I think are really, truly priceless. We are a waste aversion solution for the hospitals we work with. This can be a far more effective redirection for supplies than discarding them. And you know, the goal is to increase that reach and the volume of donated supplies considerably by starting this coalition.
WSHU: So, when you sit back and reflect on when you started this company in 2007, did you ever see the future like this? Did you think you could ever become something as big as it has?
DB: It's such a good question. I started this out of the garage in my house, and if I received a urinary catheter, I was so happy. Now, I walk through the warehouse, and it's still astonishing that we've come this far. No, but I really set, and I think this is really important when people launch an idea that doesn't yet exist, I started really small, and so it was baby steps and baby steps and baby steps so that I could wrap my arms around the learnings of every single new discovery along the way. I think if I had overreached at the start, we'd never be where we are today. But it was truly baby steps, and then I caught my breath, learned, and then set the target for the next.
For information on volunteering or donating medical supplies or money to Afya, visit their website.