About HEAL
HEAL is a student-led nonprofit made up of school chapters. Each chapter organizes its members into small teams that build health technology, conduct research, prepare competition entries, or run community health programs, and we support those chapters with funding, mentorship, and the administrative work that a school club would struggle to handle by itself.
How we started
HEAL began in 2026 as one club at Leland High School in San Jose, started by students who wanted the time they spent on health to add up to something by the end of the year.
Before HEAL, most of us had belonged to health clubs that met regularly and meant well. We listened to speakers, helped with awareness campaigns, and enjoyed the people we met, but the meetings rarely led anywhere beyond the meetings themselves, and by June there was not much to show for a year of interest in medicine.
When we set up our first project teams, we learned quickly what they needed in order to finish: a clear scope at the start, someone experienced to check the work, a small budget for materials, and deadlines the whole club took seriously. Once that was working at our school, we wrote it down for students elsewhere and arranged fiscal sponsorship through The Hack Foundation so every chapter could operate as part of a nonprofit.
How a chapter works
Every chapter runs on the same basic structure, which keeps projects moving without asking each new chapter leader to invent a system from scratch.
- 1
Project teams
Members work in small teams, each focused on a single problem in one focus area, and each team is responsible for its project from the first question through to the finished result.
- 2
Mentors
Teams are paired with mentors, such as researchers, physicians, and graduate students, who review the work as it develops and help when a team runs into something it cannot solve alone.
- 3
Milestones
Projects follow a shared calendar, with the scope set in the fall, a first version due by winter, and finished work expected in the spring, so that problems surface while there is still time to fix them.
- 4
Showcase
At the end of the school year, each chapter presents its finished projects to members, advisors, and families, which gives every team a clear deadline and an audience for what it made.
How we differ from a typical health club
Most school health clubs are built around meetings, while HEAL chapters are built around projects, and that one difference changes nearly everything about how a chapter spends its year.
| Aspect | A typical school health club | A HEAL chapter |
|---|---|---|
| What meetings are for | Presentations and guest speakers | Planning and reviewing project work |
| What members produce | Posters and awareness campaigns | Applications, papers, competition entries, and programs |
| How success is measured | Attendance | Finished projects |
| What officers do | Plan events | Keep teams on track toward their milestones |
| How the year ends | A final meeting | A showcase of finished work |
How the work is divided
Chapters make the decisions that affect their own schools, and we take care of the work that would be difficult for a single club to manage, which leaves chapter leaders free to spend their time on their teams.
Your chapter decides
- Recruiting members and choosing chapter officers
- Choosing which problems the teams work on
- Running meetings and managing project teams
- Working with the faculty advisor and the school
HEAL provides
- Nonprofit status through our fiscal sponsor
- Funding for materials and competition fees
- Access to mentors for project teams
- The launch kit, training, and ongoing support