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The award recognizes work he began in dental school at UCLA, when he and another student hoped to use their nascent health care skills as volunteers in the developing world but found a dearth of opportunities. So, in 2006, they launched their own nonprofit with $250 in startup money. HealthCare Volunteer was designed to connect individuals who want to volunteer their expertise with the more than 1 billion people around the world who lack access to basic care because of a shortage of health workers. Linking volunteers from every health care profession with underserved patients, HealthCare Volunteer has facilitated services and education for more than 1 million people in 190-plus countries.<\/p>\n
Growing up in Los Altos, California, Patel found that his driving force was always a desire to help. Following his service at the homeless shelter, he went on to volunteer at a convalescent hospital in high school and, with a fellow student, used his computer skills to start a nonprofit offering free technical support services, a venture he expanded while he was a student at Johns Hopkins. Later, that same drive to serve led him to dentistry, a field whose mechanics and hands-on nature were a good fit for his engineer\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cHealth care is the ultimate way to help people,\u201d he says. \u201cRestoring health and alleviating pain, those things you can do, are the absolute essence of existence.\u201d <\/p>\n
He\u2019s since turned HealthCare Volunteer into an online platform that, rather than creating its own projects, allows 3,000 other nonprofits to post opportunities for its 100,000 volunteers. Patel, who lives in Los Altos and Porterville, California, has also gone on to open a pediatric dental clinic in a rural, underserved area of central California, earned a patent for a system that efficiently distributes volunteers during national disasters and created a Silicon Valley startup open-air marketplace for dental services to California\u2019s underserved and uninsured.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat really drives me is change, and not money,\u201d says Patel, who credits his father\u2019s focus on citizenship with catalyzing his own passion for service. \u201cLuckily, I already had the resources myself to actually create that change.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those resources have been key to the impact he\u2019s had, says Patel, who was honored with the Outstanding Recent Graduate Award from the Johns Hopkins University Alumni Association. He says that Hopkins\u2019 hands-on opportunities gave him the practical background he needed. \u201cAn engineering degree enables you to do big things,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen you come out of college knowing how to do something that applies to the real world, you can hit the ground running.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Neilesh Patel \u201903 will never forget the day he cooked and served spaghetti at a homeless shelter at age 8, or the smile on the face of one of the menhe served. \u201cThat feeling really sparked my interest in public service,\u201d says Patel, who majored in biomedical engineering at the Whiting School with a concentration…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-currents","issue-winter-2014"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n