Eliza Li (centre), co-founder of Halad to Health in action.

The ygap First Gens team spoke with First Gens alumni and Halad to Health co-founder, Eliza Li about the impact of the pandemic on their venture, how they are supporting frontline healthcare workers and their vision for a world beyond COVID-19. 

How has Covid-19 affected/impacted your venture?

We had been seeing incredible growth on our social impact side of being able to provide free health education programs to more schools and communities in the Philippines and by the end of 2019 had just pilot tested our GAMSAT tuition services with over 50 students. During this unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic, our ordinary operations and impact work were basically made impossible, but we were set on doing our part in supporting the global response to this truly devastating health crisis.

What has been the response of Halad to Health to the global pandemic? 

Although we were hard hit, we took a gamble. Within a week, we quadrupled our GAMSAT tuition service capabilities, scaled up and moved all teaching online and started a COVID-19 Campaign that saw proceeds from our tuition services going directly to frontline healthcare workers across the world.

We launched the Covid-19 Campaign and fortunately, aspiring medical students responded. First students from Melbourne, Sydney, Queensland… then Tassie, Western Australia and even the UK were enrolling in our GAMSAT services. It was an overwhelming outpour of generosity, from aspiring health students to support frontline professionals they admired so much, to say the least.

In the month of April, we’ve had 300+ students enrol in various GAMSAT tuition events as part of the Covid-19 Campaign, who have collectively raised $8500AUD+ for frontline responders. 

For International Nurses Day on May 12th 2020, we are donating these funds to support and thank all frontliners working around the clock at:

1. Valencia Adventist Medical Center
2. Mindanao Foundation Hospital
3. Valencia City – Triage Centre
4. Valencia City – PUM Central
5. Bukidnon Provincial Hospital (Maramag)
6. The Alfred Hospital (Melbourne)
7. Alfred Health Sandringham Hospital
8. Alfred Health Caulfield Hospital

What challenges have you faced?

I think so many entrepreneurs and business owners can agree that the biggest challenge these last few months has just been the unprecedented amount of uncertainty.

Do we run? Do we close? Do we invest in recruiting? How much do we recruit?

Not having all the answers when everyone in the organisation is looking to you for them is an uncomfortable situation but a much needed reminder of a lesson that I took away from the ygap First Gens accelerator – that the only thing guaranteed is change.

Being able to navigate uncertainty has been a major learning lesson. You not only need to be able to picture the light at the end of the tunnel, but also need to paint that picture for your team to come to work everyday just as inspired, positive and hopeful. 

What are the key ingredients for quickly adapting and successfully overcoming challenges?

An incredible team you can rely on like family.

A level of over-communication.

And a tonne of love for what you do.

I truly believe that founders get too much credit and team members never enough. We truly would not have been able to scale to this capacity without each and every Halad team member. They are the ones who work day in and out to make our Covid-19 pivot work, show authorship over their role in the big picture of things and go above and beyond to help someone else out if they’re struggling. And that is what I call family. 

During this time of external uncertainty, we couldn’t risk creating any uncertainty within Halad and needed to give everyone clear cut clarity on what we were doing and going to do. For us, that looked like calling everyone to check in on them, personally give them a role and spell out how you want everyone to communicate.

And it goes without saying, that love for what you do, is the common denominator that binds people together in times of separation. 

Do you have any advice to other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to cope/adapt?

Focus on the things you CAN control. 

What does a post covid-19 world look like for your venture?

Post COVID-19, we’re going to be stronger than ever. Our team has proven that we can turn dismal situations into growing opportunities and that nothing can stop us from doing good.

We’ll continue to scale up our (now international) GAMSAT tuition capabilities to teach our growing student base and, in turn, be able to run more free health education initiatives to schools in rural Philippines.

Halad to Health is an Australian not-for-profit closing the gap in global health inequality by providing free health education to disadvantaged rural communities in the Philippines, which is funded by their GAMSAT (Medical School Admissions Exam) tuition services.

Eliza Li participated in the May 2018 First Gens cohort. 

In times of economic stability, ygap’s programs support early-stage impact ventures to refine their business models, validate the long-term viability of the venture, and increase opportunities for people to lift themselves out of poverty or disadvantage. The focus is on growth: improving profitability, increasing sales, and expanding the impact they are having in their local communities. However, these are not normal times. 

Small businesses in emerging markets – like those that we run most of our programs in – are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of this pandemic. Micro and small businesses form the backbone of emerging economies with approximately two-thirds of all formal jobs in developing countries in Asia and Latin America, and 80 per cent in low income countries, mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa. These businesses provide a market for local producers, a source of basic goods, and crucial services for vulnerable communities, reaching populations that are often overlooked by larger firms. These small businesses are now in a place where they are both particularly at risk of the economic shocks of COVID-19, and the greatest key to economic recovery. For ygap, having worked to support the growth of such businesses since 2008, this is a time not to hit pause. In fact, it has become vitally important for us to support their survival.

In response to the emerging challenges associated with COVID-19, we developed a Resiliency Toolkit for our alumni ventures and ecosystem partners that outlines clear actions that they can take to increase their resiliency in response to unexpected shocks, such as a pandemic. While this was a good first step, we knew we could be doing more. We asked ourselves how we might best support our ventures during this difficult time and what type of response would be relevant, timely, and ultimately, impactful. To help guide this response, we surveyed our alumni ventures to understand how COVID-19 has affected their businesses and how they’re working through these current challenges to determine where we can best play a role in supporting them. This is what we learnt. 

Balancing the immediate concerns of our ventures with an understanding that uncertainty abounds, we have mobilised an organisational response that is demand-driven, agile, and localised and supported by our global team. This response represents a temporary transition for ygap – from backing local change, to backing local survival. The objective of this response is to support our alumni ventures to continue operating; maintaining revenue, their employees, and their ability to create social impact. 

This response has three tiers that will enable us to produce support content and resources through our global response, engage with and support the sector through our ecosystem response, and most importantly, create locally relevant resiliency programs with each of our six program teams that respond to the unique needs of that area. 

We recognise that these are unprecedented times and that significant  unknowns remain. Firstly, we recognise the state of the pandemic differs between each country we work in. Varying government restrictions, lockdown laws, and the type of venture itself all impact the ability of our entrepreneurs to operate. Secondly, we have never supported our ventures through a pandemic before, so there may be any number of variables that could appear as we roll out this response. Finally, we expect that given these unknowns and the current rate of change surrounding the pandemic, that the type of support required by our ventures will change over time.

We are, however, confident that our core capabilities and skills as an organisation – conducting detailed needs assessments, providing operational and strategic support, developing learning resources and content, brokering connections, and distributing capital in an effective way – will enable us to respond to these unknowns if and when they occur.  

What we know for sure is that we are not going away, and that we will continue to evolve our outputs to support local impact ventures and the communities in which they work. We will continue to back local.

– Simon Lee, Head of Global Programs, ygap 

The team at Anika. Noel Lim (back,centre) is  an alumni of ygap First Gens Program, November 2018 cohort

The ygap First Gens team spoke with Anika Legal’s CEO and co-founder, Noel Lim about the impact of the pandemic on their venture, how Anika Legal is supporting Victorian renters  and their vision for a world beyond COVID-19. 

How has Covid-19 affected Anika Legal? 

“As we were already a predominantly remote organisation that provided virtual legal services and virtual legal education, Anika was well-positioned to adapt to the effects of COVID-19. As soon as lockdown laws were announced, Anika had an emergency meeting to identify how best we could help. Within two weeks we launched our COVID-19 Rent Reduction service. With renters and universities being hit with restrictive self-isolation policies, the demand for both legal service and legal education sky-rocketed. As the Anika team is already well acquainted with working remotely, the team was eager and able to meet the increased client and university demand!”

What support is Anika Legal providing to those affected by COVID-19?

“In the wake of widespread financial insecurity, Anika sought to assist in any way we could. Given our usual scope is assisting residential renters to get repairs, we thought our services may be well suited to assisting renters facing financial hardship to negotiate a rent reduction. 

Within less than a month of launching our service, we have been stunned by the number of enquiries we’ve had. We’re approaching our 50th client and it appears the need for our product will continue to increase. Eventually we hope to further develop this service so that every Victorian renter facing hardship can access the legal assistance they need to successfully negotiate a win-win rent reduction with their landlord, helping provide security to vulnerable members of our community. We’ve already begun hearing positive feedback stories – in one case a renter received a 50% rent reduction!”

What have been the challenges you’ve faced?

“Our greatest challenge has been continuing to meet the increased client demand with a significant reduction to available funding as a result of COVID-19. The Anika team is passionate about providing access to justice, now more than ever. Continuing to do that with less funding has meant we’ve had to look for new sources of funding, and to consider what is the most impactful use of the resources we do have.”

What are the key ingredients for overcoming challenges?

“Asking for help. As a virtual legal service in the tenancy space, Anika is perfectly placed to assist the hundreds of thousands of Victorian renters who are struggling to maintain their housing security as they experience severe financial hardship from this pandemic. Being a startup, Anika is also able to move quickly, as demonstrated by the rapid launch of our COVID-19 Rent Reduction service. Anika is uniquely placed to provide relief to vulnerable communities in these tough times, so we’ve reached out to individuals and organisations who can help us, help those who need it most.”

How have you been able to adapt so fast in the face of a pandemic?

“Being a remote startup with a team incredibly passionate about providing access to justice is the perfect combination for moving quickly to adapt to the unexpected. The keys to launching our COVID-19 Rent Reduction service so quickly were worked on from day 1 – to have a team with compassion for the vulnerable Australians experiencing hardship because of COVID-19, and a culture of curiosity to constantly challenge the way things are done, embrace change, and innovate.”

What does a post covid-19 world look like for Anika?

“A world where legal services and university law schools understand and embrace the effectiveness and importance of virtual legal service and virtual legal education. Anika’s client feedback clearly demonstrates that being able to access legal services remotely significantly improves the experience. Anika’s student feedback demonstrates that law students have so much to learn about being lawyers in an evolving legal industry which isn’t taught during a traditional law degree. COVID-19 has made the ability to do both of those things remotely painfully clear. Anika deeply hopes that a post COVID-19 world is a world where legal services and law schools see the importance of virtual services for their users, and embrace a new, innovative way of doing things.”

Anika Legal is a free online legal service that helps vulnerable Victorian renters get their properties repaired. In addition to providing legal assistance to people who can’t access it, Anika also provides practical legal education to law students. 

In November 2018, Noel Lim, co-founder of Anika Legal participated in the ygap First Gens program.