Our Story

Beginning as a pilot initiative in 2015

DiverseCity began as a pilot initiative back in 2015, started by a small team of students in college to try and help address our struggles to find relatable role models in various professional fields. We began collecting burning questions we had from friends and community members, then found people a few steps further along in their journey who could meaningfully share perspectives to those questions.

Over time, those conversations snowballed. With support and funding from the OZY Genius Award received by our co-founder Christine Chen, we were able to start filming in-depth, honest, intimate conversations with our own personal role models and community leaders about their journeys to where they were. We filmed interviews with physicians, educators, non-profit leaders, community organizers, to name a few. For us, engaging in those interviews were themselves a powerful form of learning and growth as well.

sharing stories with a wider audience

But we also wanted those stories to reach a wider audience. So we shared those stories online and helped facilitate in-person connections with students and mentors along the way. We built a simple website where users could search for and find stories that resonated with them. This online platform and the videos it featured were shared freely online as an educational resource for teachers via Edmodo Spotlight, shared via organizations like CollegeTrack, and even organically utilized in career workshops at Stanford University and various other organizations throughout the US.

Here are a few testimonials from teachers across the US who used our DiverseCity pilot website in their classrooms!

evolving to a platform focused on the medical path

Over time, we realized having stories were important, but only the first step. We also needed to help facilitate community-building both on- and off-line to really establish a sustainable sense of belonging. We were also inspired by the phase in life we were in. Several of our core leaders had just begun medical school, and we wanted to focus our effort on supporting those along the medical journey—to help pay forward all the support and belief we received on our own medical journeys.

Those realizations helped motivate the second phase of DiverseCity—which we are in now! We have temporarily taken our prior videos down as we re-explore how to approach this next phase, though anticipate they will return in some form on our updated site.

exploring new goals and looking ahead to the future

We are now actively seeking community input on how to continue evolving this platform to meaningful address the needs from our fellow medical community. In 2021, our team also received the 2021 American Medical Association’s ChangeMedEd Bright Ideas Grant to expand DiverseCity into medicine, and we are determined to use these resources to re-invest in building communities in medicine.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We want to express deep thanks to the following individuals and organizations who supported us during our early pilot initiative, and whose support laid the foundation for where we are today.