Sonia Sarkar

Healthworks Community Fitness is a registered 501( C)(3) nonprofit organization devoted to serving the health and fitness needs of women and children in low-income Boston neighborhoods. We believe that all women, regardless of economic status, deserve access to high-quality fitness opportunities and health education.

Our mission is to advance reproductive and maternal health equity by intentionally leveraging capital to center the needs, experiences, and perspectives of historically marginalized people in decision-making. The multibillion-dollar reproductive and maternal health market has tremendous potential for public health impact, but it has been built on flawed systems that perpetuate unjust outcomes for women of color, low-income women, and others directly affected by systemic inequities. Our work is to transform this market. Operating in a novel impact space, we seek opportunities to move investment toward reproductive and maternal health in a way that does not perpetuate harm and that will yield measurable, sustainable improvements in health outcomes. Our activities include impact investment to stimulate innovation and equity in women’s health, ecosystem building to support entrepreneurs and investors incorporating health equity into business strategy, narrative change to shift harmful social norms that influence the market, and corporate advocacy to promote corporate responsibility and improve public policy regarding reproductive and maternal health.

We are America’s first research university, founded in 1876 on the principle that by pursuing big ideas and sharing what we learn, we can make the world a better place. For more than 140 years, our faculty and students have worked side by side in pursuit of discoveries that improve lives. Johns Hopkins enrolls more than 24,000 full- and part-time students throughout nine academic divisions. Our faculty and students study, teach, and learn across more than 260 programs in the arts and music, the humanities, the social and natural sciences, engineering, international studies, education, business, and the health professions.The university has four campuses in Baltimore; one in Washington, D.C.; one in Montgomery County, Maryland; and facilities throughout the Baltimore-Washington region as well as in China and Italy. The university takes its name from 19th-century Maryland philanthropist Johns Hopkins, an entrepreneur who believed in improving public health and education in Baltimore and beyond.

Healthworks Community Fitness is a registered 501( C)(3) nonprofit organization devoted to serving the health and fitness needs of women and children in low-income Boston neighborhoods. We believe that all women, regardless of economic status, deserve access to high-quality fitness opportunities and health education.