Meet Alumni:

Heman Bekele

2023 3M Young Scientist Challenge Winner
2026 Alumni Grant Recipient

Heman was awarded the Science in Your Community Grant for his work on “CareForAll,” a youth-led nonprofit that equips young people around the world with the skills, mentorship, and resources needed to advance health equity and address barriers to healthcare access in underserved communities.

About their Project

CareForAll is a youth-led nonprofit founded in 2025 with the mission of empowering young people to become compassionate, community-engaged healthcare leaders. Through student-led projects, health education, mentorship opportunities, mass social media awareness campaigns, and professional development programming, we equip young leaders with the tools to design and implement community-informed solutions that advance health equity.

To date, we have reached over 2,000 young people worldwide, with CareForAll programming established in over 20 countries across 5 continents. Since introducing our chapter system, we have established 5 chapters with a collective 280 members.

This funding would support the continued growth of CareForAll’s efforts to help students and chapters launch local health-promoting initiatives, expand public health education resources, and strengthen the infrastructure needed to mobilize young people worldwide who are interested in making a difference in health equity. For more information, visit careforall.org.

What was the inspiration behind your project?

A lot of inspiration came from seeing healthcare inequality firsthand and realizing how many people around the world still struggle to access even basic care. The ethos at the core of my original project and everything I work on today is that innovation only really matters if people can actually reach it and afford it.

That idea stayed with me while I was working on my own research, and eventually it grew into CareForAll. I wanted to create something that focused not just on healthcare innovation itself, but also on access, education, and giving young people a role in solving these problems too.