Hope Is A Verb - Chesca Colloredo -Mansfeld - 'Miracle' treatment changing the lives of 80,000+ kids

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

Meet Chesca Colloredo Mansfeld, a social entrepreneur who co-founded Miracle Feet: a low-cost, non-surgical treatment that has made an extraordinary impact on the lives of over 80,000 children born with clubfoot in low and middle income countries. FIND OUT MORE ABOUT MIRACLE FEET: https://www.miraclefeet.org/ https://www.instagram.com/miraclefeet/ This episode of Hope Is A Verb was hosted by Angus Hervey, cofounder of Future Crunch and Amy Davoren-Rose, creative director. The soundtrack for this podcast is "Rain" composed and performed by ⁠⁠⁠⁠El Rey Miel ⁠⁠⁠⁠from their upcoming album "Sea the Sky." Audio Sweetening by Anthony Badolato- ⁠⁠⁠⁠Ai3 Audio and Voice⁠⁠⁠⁠. You can contact us at: [e-mail]

Welcome to Season 2 of Hope is a Verb, a podcast that explores what it takes to change the world through conversations with the people that are making it happen. I'm Amy. I'm Gus, and these are the unknown heroes who are mending our planet, stitching together a better future, and showing us the best of what it means to be human. It's not just treating a child. It's not just about being able to walk. It's about those kids being able to realize their potential and to have dreams that are really big of changing

their own country and giving back. Sometimes people are like, why do you care so much about feet? This is not about feet. This is about the rest of it. It's about the life that unlocking those feet is going to open up. When it comes to mending global health issues, sometimes the solution already exists. The problem is it's not equally distributed or accessible. Clubfoot affects one in 800 kids worldwide and in countries with advanced healthcare systems, the condition is treated after birth. So most kids go on to live healthy, active lives. Unfortunately, in low or middle income countries, it's a different story and one that we don't hear about enough.

Limited access to clubfoot treatment has left too many young people facing the lifetime of unnecessary pain and stigma, which is why entrepreneur Cheska Collerator-Mansfeld decided to leave her corporate career to tackle this inequity. 13 years ago, she co-founded Miracle Feet, an organization with a simple, low-cost treatment that has given over 80,000 kids worldwide access to mobility, independence, and the possibility of a better, brighter future.

and the possibility of a better, brighter future. Cheska, welcome to the podcast. It is so lovely to have you here. Thank you so much, Amy and Gus. Thank you very much for inviting me today. We are interested, Cheska. Is there a news story anywhere in the world that is giving you hope right now? Wow, it's a tough moment in the news cycle right now. But yes, there are some stories that are giving me hope. I get a lot of

newsletters and information coming in about global health because it's the area that I'm so focused on. And it's pretty exciting. Some of the new innovations around malaria vaccines and eradication of some NTDs in certain countries. And that trickle keeps going and it keeps coming in. And I think it's easy to get discouraged by the negative. But when you actually hear those stories about the progress that is being made in global health, it's incredibly heartwarming and encouraging and reaffirms that we can do this. I also, I was thinking about this, about sort of the general atmosphere out there. And this isn't really news as much as I'm incredibly excited about young people. And I have kids who are,

you know, kind of growing up and at university and just starting out on their careers. And as I meet their friends and I hear what they're talking about and I hear what they care about, I am very encouraged that the sort of next generations are growing up with a broader view. I think they're kinder. I think they think more about the world and about each other. And so that's another place that I am feeling excited about and hopeful about. Both of those are just such great answers that we could do an entire podcast about those subject areas. I'm interested in this question of younger people. Do you think that there is genuinely something qualitatively different or is it a case of kind of wishful thinking

that maybe each generation says, oh, you know, the kids will sort it out? I think there is something genuinely different. I think maybe I'm comparing it to my generation, which is a little older than your generation. And I feel like we were very self-centered. We didn't have a lot of information about what was going on globally. And our worlds were pretty limited. Our worldview was a little bit myopic. And so I think there's a difference just because of technology. Kids are growing up exposed to so much more.

And I think they're making the connections about what's happening locally is connected to what's happening in other parts of the world. And what we do here has implications and vice versa. So I feel like because they've got more information, they're making those connections. But the problems that we're facing are complex, scary, urgent, and I don't want to put it just on them and say, it's all going to be okay because they're going to solve it. My kids have given me a lot of feedback about that. Like, we don't want to hear that anymore. Like, no, we can't solve all your problems.

But when they're talking, I just, I feel a level of kindness and compassion and feeling that we're all in this together that I'm not sure I had growing up. And so I hope there's a difference and that I'm not just, it's not just wishful thinking on my part. Okay. Well, let's talk a little bit about growing up.

Do you have any memories or events from your childhood that you think might have planted the seed for the work that you do now or the work that you have been doing for the last 13 years? Very much so. I often talk about how Miracle Feet came out of my childhood. So I was lucky enough that my father's work took us around the world. And I grew up living in different countries in Africa and Asia as a child. And I can remember very clearly driving on a snowy day in Turkey, and we were living in Ankara, which is quite a big city. And we were driving out to go sledding. And I was all dressed up in my snow boots and a big thick jacket and the

heating was on in the car. And we had to drive across the city landfill in order to get out of town to this place, this hill where we would go sledding. And I looked through the window and there were all these children picking through the trash and they didn't have proper shoes on, they weren't dressed properly, and they were in the trash and they were looking for things that they could take home out of what others like us had thrown away. It was just this searing memory of this is not fair and we need to do something to address that. And I really think I kept that with me. And I ended up going on a path where I ended up working in the corporate world, which was very far off what I thought I would do.

But constantly there was this little voice in my head saying, this is not what you're supposed to do. At some point, you've got to come back to that feeling of inequity and that you owe the world to try to do something that's going to make it a little better for kids in the countries that you lived in. There was a long journey to get there to figure out what was going to be, but it definitely came from those early experiences. So I find this really interesting because you were in the corporate world. figure out what it was going to be, but it definitely came from those early experiences. So I find this really interesting because you were in the corporate world, it was management consulting and tech startups. So what was the point? What was the event that made you transition into social entrepreneurship? Because it feels like quite a leap. Yeah, it was a leap, but it was a leap I had been wanting to do and waiting to do for a while.

The tricky part for me was how can I bring my skills and do something that makes sense where I will make a difference, right? I'm not a doctor. I'm not a teacher. I'm not a nurse. I'm not an engineer. I'm a business person.

That's kind of hard to draw the dots and say, how am I going to make a difference? And so I was sort of constantly dissatisfied at some level with the work I was doing. I found it interesting. I loved the people I worked with. I was learning a lot. I was good at it. I made a nice salary, which helped my family live a nice life and allowed my husband to be an academic and go get his PhD and those kinds of things. So it was all very practical, right? But there was something inside me which was like, this isn't what you're supposed to be doing. So I was constantly looking and I was literally sitting in my office at the University of Iowa

and I had shifted from the tech startup world and was working at the business school where my husband was for his first tenure track job. And someone walked into my office and said, we hear that you like Africa and we know that you're a strategy person. I want to show you something. And he proceeded to show me a video of a little boy standing in a doorway and his feet were completely turned in and his head was hanging down. And through the doorway, you could see kids running around and playing. around and playing. And this gentleman went on to explain to me that this child had been born with clubfoot and had never been treated because there was no treatment available. He was destined probably never to run around and play with the other kids. She probably wasn't going to school. And by the way, there's a doctor right here at the University of Iowa that has figured out how to treat this condition without surgery at very low cost and getting radically better long-term outcomes as a result of this treatment.

I literally burst into tears at my desk when I saw this image. We just had our third child and our other two were soccer players. And it just felt, again, so unfair that this kid was destined to live his life in the shadows, on the sidelines, while he could have been out there running around if he had access to what I just learned was something that was very easily treatable. And so the story was that this guy wanted my help and said, Dr. Ponsetti's dying wish is to get this treatment to all the kids in countries where there is no treatment at all for clubfoot. Through the tears, I said, okay, I'm going to help you. And I went home that night and I said

to my husband, I was like, the most amazing thing happened today. John Buchanan, this guy that was sort of a local philanthropist, walked into my office and he told me about this condition and I know what I need to do with my life now. I don't know how, and I don't quite know when I'm going to do this, but I know that this is something I need to work on. It was a true kind of aha moment. And I look back on it and I thought about other opportunities or other things I had heard about that maybe I hadn't jumped on because they come up in life, right? Little opportunities, but it's not the right moment. We can't all do maybe the right thing at the right moment because it just doesn't fit with everything else that's going on. You're just starting a new job or your kids are too young

or you can't move or whatever it is, right? There can be reasons why it's not convenient. And I truly think that this conversation just happened to happen at a moment where I could step up and say, you've just handed me an opportunity that I'm going to take it. But it was something I'd been looking for throughout my career. I was on the lookout for it. It was not out of the blue, even though it reads that way on a resume. Yeah. Timing plays such an important role in any of this kind of work. But the reality of actually doing it, like there's no money, there's no salary. I mean, how did you get through that first year? Oh, that first year was crazy. I decided that I was going to quit my

job. And I remember sitting at my kitchen table with a blank sheet of paper thinking, oh my goodness, how the heck am I going to do this? I have no idea. I don't have a background in public health. I am not a doctor. I don't really know that much about Clubfoot. But I was really, really fortunate in that by this point in my career, I had been to business school. I had worked in corporate America. I had made lots of friends and had big networks of people who trusted me. And I went to those people and said, I've got this crazy idea. This is why I think this matters. And I was able to raise money. And I just had some amazing moments of what I call luck. Others would say fate or serendipity or whatever it is. There was some bigger forces working to make sure that this happened, right? Making those connections, helping me have the right conversation at the right time. And so I think with Miracle Feet, it was definitely an issue that needed to be solved.

It was the right time, right? Dr. Ponsetti had come up with this amazing innovation. The medical innovation was in place. It had now been accepted. So it was kind of not too risky to introduce this new way of treating clubfoot internationally. So the opportunity was there. And then on top of that, I think my experience in the corporate sector and the networks I had built, the expertise I had built, and the confidence I had built allowed me to launch this. And I don't think I would have been able to do it if I decided to launch Miracle Feet right out of college.

What is Miracle Feet? For listeners who don't know, can you tell us what you do? Miracle Feet is a US-based nonprofit, and we were created to make sure that all children born with clubfoot, which is a very common birth defect, would have access to quality care. Clubfoot affects one in every 800 kids born worldwide. So it's really remarkably common, but many people haven't heard about it. And it's not an issue that gets a lot of attention. And part of the reason for that is if you're born with clubfoot in Australia or the US or Europe, you're going to get treated routinely at birth. And so we don't see it. There are world-class athletes, Steven Gerrard, John Rahm, number one golfer, Mia Hamm, one of the best women's soccer players out there,

all born with clubfoot, all treated the same way, who went on to have incredible careers using their feet, right? So if treated, clubfoot doesn't have to be an issue. If it's not treated, you can't walk properly. And if you can't walk properly and you're born in India or Zimbabwe or Paraguay, you're probably not going to be able to get to school. There's a lot of stigma associated with physical disability. And so families are embarrassed and hide the kids away. So they tend to be isolated. Often they're

malnourished. They're often illiterate. And so life just spirals in a terrible direction because these kids just happen to have been born with a birth defect, but a birth defect that's fully treatable and very easily treated. The actual treatment itself involves a simple manipulation of the tendons and ligaments. And then the foot is put in a cast. And after a week, the cast is taken off. And you do that between four and eight times and the feet get moved into a fully corrected position. After treatment, the children have to sleep in a brace at night. They don't wear it during the day so they can learn to crawl and learn to walk. But at night, in order to hold that correction that we've achieved and to stop the feet from sort of pushing back in when they go through a growth spurt,

they have to sleep in this brace. And those aren't often available in a lot of countries. And if they are, they're not always of great quality and sometimes they're very expensive. So any kid that is treated at a Miracle Feet supported clinic gets free braces for the whole period that they need braces. It's a lot of different things, but none of them are that complicated. They just have to be well executed, right? Yeah, easy, right? You know, taken on its own, each one of those is not that difficult or that complicated.

The tricky part is doing it well, right? But even that's not that difficult compared to finding a cure for cancer or tackling climate change. That's why I love this problem. That's why I was so excited to find it because it's not that difficult. this conversation shows us the power that just one treatment has to radically change the trajectory of a young life and it also makes me think about how much the ability to simply move impacts our daily life and how we respond to the world. It's really easy to understand Cheska's passion for this project. And when she talks about timing, it raises a lot of questions, including the one that you're about to hear.

Because once you've built an organisation that's changing the world, when is the right time to hand over the reins and step aside? to hand over the reins and step aside. Cheska, how many kids has Miracle Feet treated worldwide? To date, we have enrolled over 86,000 children, and that takes place in 36 different countries that we work in around the world, in mostly Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. 80% of kids born with clubfoot live in low and middle income countries where there's very limited

or no access to treatment. So we were focused on low and middle income countries. And early on, we realized that what we needed to do was train local doctors and build the capacity within the medical system in each country, right? It didn't make sense to put doctors from wealthy countries on airplanes and fly them in to treat a few kids. We wanted to solve the problem in a long-term and sustainable way. We support about 300, over 300 clinics. Our plan is always to build a network of clinics to make sure that everybody has access regardless of where you live. And we've trained thousands of physical therapists and surgeons and pediatricians in how to do this technique. Now, I know from 13 years of doing this work, you literally have tens of

thousands of stories. Are there any that really stand out for you? Oh, gosh. It's the stories when you talk to some of the older kids who talk about how they were bullied, how they couldn't go to school. And now they're talking to you about, I want to be a lawyer because I want to change this for other people. I want to be a doctor. There was a girl in Senegal that I met about a year and a half ago. And she had lived with untreated clubfoot until she was about 12 or 14 and never been able to walk anywhere. Her parents had gone to endless lengths looking for treatment. So it was not like they didn't care. And the mom traveled a long distance to get this treatment and carried her 12-year-old

in and out of the clinic because there were no crutches and no wheelchairs to help her. The point that I met this child, she was absolutely dead set that she was going to be a lawyer and she was going to be a human rights lawyer working on children's issues in Senegal. And I just thought, wow, you know, it's not just treating a child. It's not just about being able to walk. It's about those kids being able to realize their potential and to have dreams that are really big of changing their own country and giving back. Sometimes people are like, why do you care so much about feet? This is not about feet. This is about the rest of it. It's about the life that unlocking those feet

is going to open up. I'd love to know more about how you've used technology. Obviously, it's played a big role in achieving your mission. And I imagine that technology itself has evolved and changed a lot over 13 years of doing this work. Yeah, I would love to, because I feel very strongly about this. When we first started Miracle Feet, one of the really important conversations that I had was with the CEO of Smile Train, which is obviously a very large nonprofit that has

been addressing the issue of cleft palate for many years. They were decades ahead of us. And Brian Mullaney said to me, one of the most important things you must do is you must make sure you collect the information about the quality of treatment for every child so that you know that you're delivering good care. And we were asking people in Liberia and in Zimbabwe to try to upload patient records onto a terrible database with internet that was spotty and crashed all the time. And yet we knew that it was critical that we had this information. And so we were very lucky after about two years of struggling with this system that we were trying to make work, Google put out

a call for proposals for using technology for people with disabilities. Next thing I knew, I was sitting in an office in San Francisco espousing about how if we could build a mobile phone-based data collection system, that this would become the beating heart of our program. I didn't know what I was talking about, but I knew we needed better technology. And that proved to be the case. They gave us a million dollars and we were able to build this incredibly sophisticated but simple data collection system that allows doctors to put information in on a mobile phone. We don't have to worry about internet connectivity. It all goes through the 4G or the 5G network.

And they can access that information and we can sit in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and look at it on a per child basis, a clinic basis, a country basis, a global basis. And as a result, we can tell you or anyone exactly how many kids reach which stage, what's the average number of casts, how many kids have the tenotomy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we use data across everything we do to determine where our resources get used and to replicate and to scale at levels we never thought was going to be possible. Okay, that's really interesting. And perhaps maybe something that doesn't get spoken about enough. The other thing that doesn't get told as often is that on the surface, you present to the world this finished, well-operating, good-looking charity, but it's not that easy, right? I mean,

what goes on behind the scenes can be really tricky. Can you tell us about some of the stories that maybe you don't hear on the glossy brochure? Absolutely. I don't think anybody remembers to tell a story how hard you have to work in the beginning. My family bore the brunt of this in a big way, from the hours away, working all night, traveling, and the anxiety and the stress of trying to a big way, from the hours away, working all night, traveling, and the anxiety and the stress of trying to get something like this off the ground and feeling so responsible for all these clinics that we were starting. And are we going to be able to continue to fund them? Maybe I took that too far, but that drove me, I mean, to a degree that was not healthy.

There were a couple of years where I didn't sleep well. I was very stressed out. It was the fear of letting down people that had put their faith in me and in Miracle Feed that was most terrifying. And then there are just the bad things that can happen. And we had a couple of places where we partnered with different organizations. And after a couple of years, it was clear that it just wasn't the right fit and it wasn't working. And in particular, we partnered in a big way twice in India, and both of those ended up,

we terminated both of those. I still relive, what did we do wrong? What could we have done differently that might've had a different result? The bumps in the road never end. We had a full-scale program in Myanmar and then there was the coup and the health system there is essentially shut down. And there was another occasion where I woke up and there had been an earthquake in Nicaragua and the hospital that was most damaged was the hospital that we worked in. And suddenly, you know, the sort of centerpiece of our program was completely shattered. Those kinds of things happen all the time. So there's kind of a constant set of activities that go on that are outside your control that you're having to manage and work around.

And then there are the Indias of the world where you, some for whatever reason, don't quite operate at the level you need to to find success. And those are the ones that you beat yourself up over because you might have been able to prevent them if you could do it again. Chesca, this has been such a huge journey. And we read that you decided to step down as CEO. And this is another story that maybe isn't spoken about as much. I'm really interested, how does that transition feel? And when did you know it was time?

So it's been hard. This is really complicated, right? And I remember thinking about three years ago that Miracle Feet had been incredibly successful. We had exceeded our expectations in terms of what we've been able to achieve. But the true success was that this was going to survive beyond me, right? I helped start it. I had run the organization. And I felt a tremendous weight on my shoulders for constantly raising the money and constantly growing and started to think like, how am I ever going to get out from under this? It's not going to really be a true solution unless it outlasts me.

it's not going to really be a true solution unless it outlasts me. So I have to somehow find a way to get myself out of this position without compromising the organization and allow somebody else to step in and take this forward. And that sounded easy when I first started thinking about it and sounded very logical. And then it kind of took on a life of its own. And we recruited a wonderful person, Daphne Sorensen. She and I worked together for two years. And then we had the difficult conversation, the two of us, about what is the right time for you to take this on? Because it had been explicit that we were hiring her in order to be the future CEO as long as things worked out. That moment was tough for me because it was kind of like I wanted this and I was so thrilled and I adored Daphne and I had enormous confidence in her

and I believed that we had found the right person to take this on. But it was not easy for me to say, okay, it's time, I need to step aside. And I had to be willing to kind of accept it was time. It's been a journey, one that I initiated and was fully supportive of. But even with knowing that,

there were moments where I was like, oh my gosh, I'm not quite ready. The other part of it was the recognition on my part that I'm an entrepreneur and I love building things. And I've built a number of different things over my career in the corporate world. And I am less excited about building process and policy and sort of the stable building the organization. The day-to-day tasks are actually less exciting to me and I'm not as good at them as that very kind of early stage entrepreneurial, build it, creative and risk-taking, right? You know, I mean, I think to start an organization, you have to be very comfortable with risk. And I kind of thrive on risk a little bit. I like a bit of risk.

And the risk was going away. So I did also recognize that maybe it's time for me to step to the side because the entrepreneurial part is done. So it does make me question, are there other ideas brewing? So it's really only been a month. We handed over to the new CEO a year ago, but for that year, I was still very involved in fundraising and spending a lot of time. So I didn't really have time to kind of go to that next place of what next. And there are ideas percolating. I don't think I'm going to start another organization

from scratch. I think I've done that and I'm going to say, okay, others can do that. There are a bunch of issues that I really care about, that I'm hearing about as people are starting to talk to me about different things where, similar to Miracle Feet, where it's sort of a no-brainer issue. There's a solution. It just needs to be implemented and scaled. I like that space, but I think the role that I'm probably going to be playing is as a mentor and as an advisor to others who are trying to build organizations. So I would love to be helping others avoid some of the mistakes we made and maybe benefiting from some of the experience that I gained in the last 13 years. So in that mentor role, is there one piece of advice that you'd give somebody who's starting out? I think the biggest piece of advice is just do it, right? There's always reasons why you can't

do it. There's always, you never feel quite qualified. You shouldn't let that stop you. If you find something that you're passionate about and you think is important, go for it. you're passionate about and you think is important, go for it. Because there aren't enough people, I think, who have the right personality to go for it. If you are someone who has an inclination to start something, those people need to be encouraged to do it and to jump off the cliff and try. Because if they can get the right people around them, it doesn't matter that you don't necessarily have the technical expertise, the subject matter expertise. If you've got the drive

and you can bring in the right people and you can network the bejeebers out of it and you can educate yourself on the right way to do this. That's fantastic. And a last question for you. What does the word hope mean to you? Well, I thought about this a little bit because of

the title of this podcast. Hope is an attitude and it's a feeling. If we look for the positive in the world, we can feel optimistic that there's a way for humanity to solve the problems that we're facing. But then I think there's an action piece to it too, that you feel hopeful if you believe that you can make a difference. So I think it's some combination of like being optimistic about what we can do together as humanity, but also being willing to say, I'm going to be part of that and I'm going to activate that. And I'm going to act hopefully by trying to make a difference. I think we all

have a lot more ability in us to change the world than we might recognize. This idea of taking action is at the heart of so much of Cheska's story. It's not lost on us that her willingness to step up and create Miracle Feed has allowed so many young people to walk into very different futures. It's all about momentum. Every time we show up, we increase our chances of making a difference and doing something great for the world. If you're interested in finding out more about Miracle Feet,

check out our show notes for details. We are proud to have supported Cheska's work throughout Give a Damn charity, and we thank our paying subscribers for making these donations possible. If you want to find out more about becoming a paid subscriber, go to futurecrunch.com. This podcast is recorded in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people. There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. If you enjoyed this episode and you would like to support Hope as a Verb,

please subscribe and leave a review. of herb, please subscribe and leave a review. And if you want to reach out directly, email us at hope at futurecrunch.com.au. Thanks for listening.