Margo Health

I'm applying for the elevate prize to help fund and get better resources to further my project's mission to improve reporting for gender violence victims. This project began as a Master's thesis project and is a unique project that sits between politics, health, design and government. Because of this, traditional funding is often difficult to acquire, however funding is essential to this phase. The funding from this prize would allow us to build and develop a redesigned sexual assault evidence kit and tracking software while also growing our team.  

I am a designer, strategist, researcher and founder of Margo. I started off my career working in sustainability and urban governance, and after learning more and more about sustainability and urban planning issues, I became frustrated with how many political barriers and few concrete solutions got through to create change. Shortly after I discovered design and the power it had in truly changing people's opinions and behaviors, and went to get a Master's in Products of Design at the School of Visual Arts. During that time, I heard about the thousands of untested sexual assault evidence kits (rape kits) and immediately thought that this had to be a design problem and choose to investigate the topic further as my Master's thesis. I spent a year researching responses to sexual assault, became a sexual assault advocate at the New York Presbyterian Hospital and found that the problem was far worse than I had originally imagined. The thesis work resulted in 6 different design solutions which have now been consolidated into Margo, a company looking to improve reporting and evidence collection for gender violence victims in the United States and eventually expand to create a global transformation and improved justice system. 

In the US someone is sexually assaulted every 73 seconds. In South Africa, someone is sexually assaulted every 26 seconds. However, in the US, only 30% of survivors report the crime and less than 1% of sexual assault cases end in a conviction. This means that the current system isn't working and that the ways to get help are not sufficient, which is by reporting and getting a rape kit. These kits are not widely available (only in 20% of US hospitals) and are disproportionately available to whiter wealthier neighborhoods. They can take up to 10 hours to complete, and are described by healthcare providers as confusing and too time consuming. 

Margo is a redesigned sexual assault evidence kit (rape kit) and integrated digital platform that improves the experience of reporting and collecting evidence for both healthcare providers and victims. The kit is redesigned to make the process faster and more seamless for providers, and the platform aims to improve communication and collaboration between victims, nurses, police and cities creating a space where victims receive better transparency into the reporting process, can better document their case and can track their kits. 

Margo is innovative because we are working to change a very large systemic and political issue through design and partnerships. The sexual assault and domestic violence industry is currently setup and mostly decided by committees constructed of healthcare providers, District Attorneys, other city officials, advocates, police and lawyers. However, these organizations are not used to innovation and design leading their processes. Margo believes that through design, we can create a product that once used can open up the space for more opportunity, innovation and improvement in a way that traditional policy cannot. This means by creating products that are use human-centered design, trauma-informed design and user-led processes. Additionally, while other adjacent companies are taking a more common startup approach of disruption and bulldozing the current system, we firmly believe in partnerships, coalitions and co-creation by working with the existing systems to create a more collaborative solution. 

Currently, sexual assault and domestic violence is a global epidemic. This problem exists for many reasons. We live in an extremely patriarchal society where it is the norm to defend a male perpetrator rather than believe a female victim (I am using binary gender as 91% of victims are women and nearly 99% of perpetrators are male). This patriarchal system seeps into every form of reporting from how difficult it is to seek or understand help, how traumatizing getting help can be, how insensitive and biased police and legal systems are towards reporting and the general consensus from society that sexual assault is simply a norm. There is no world, where the current way we treat and respond to women and sexual assault victims should be acceptable. Therefore, Margo's aim is that by improving reporting and the way that victims can seek help, in tandem with improving the way that the system responds and tracks cases we can start to create a new norm where sexual assault and domestic violence is truly treated like the crime that it is, and where victims can begin to see the justice they have been robbed of in the US and around the globe.