In this episode of Design For Change, join host Sheela Sethuraman as she interviews Dr. Vera Cordeiro Rio, founder of Renascer.

During the 10 years Dr. Cordeiro Rio spent working in the pediatric wing of a Brazilian hospital, she often saw the same children re-hospitalized over and over again. In order to help these children, she realized she would have to address the root causes of the poverty these children lived in, and to do that she formed Renascer, a health and social service provider that she is franchising and replicating across Brazil and beyond.

Dr. Cordeiro Rio observed that many poor families are run by a single mother and lack financial and other resources to manage the health care of their children. She concluded that children would relapse because the mother could not afford medicine, didn't live in a suitable home, or through reinfection from their siblings. Renascer takes a comprehensive approach to tackle the root issues of this problem. Families answer a long questionnaire to determine the true nature of their situation. Depending on the results, mothers receive vocational training so that they could provide for their families; homes are rebuilt or repaired; and families receive medication to prevent spreading and recurrence. According to Dr. Cordeiro Rio this approach saves local hospitals over $300,000 per year by reducing re-hospitalization.

Dr. Cordeiro Rio always had the vision that this kind of care would spread beyond a few people in her city. To grow Renascer she attracted funding from public and private sources by proving the positive effects of her work. In addition, she launched project Fish Hook, which sells branded merchandise with the organization's logo; she believes that anyone that wants to change the world needs a balance between for-profit and social outreach in order to to stabilize funding. She has worked with other NGOs based around hospitals to develop programs that provide similar care, and she hopes to see it in all 5,000 hospitals in Brazil and across the world.