Dr. Toyin Ajayi has an ambitious mission: to make health care accessible to all.
Ajayi is the founder and CEO of Cityblock Health, a primary care provider focused on helping underserved communities in the U.S.
She’s not fazed by the enormity of her goal.
“All the things we enjoy and take for granted today didn’t exist [at] one time. Someone dreamed them into existence,” she says.
Having “a sense of confidence and agency” is the key to tackling complex issues, Ajayi told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin on the latest episode of the “CNBC Changemakers and Power Players” podcast.
After receiving her medical degree from King’s College London School of Medicine in 2008, Ajayi moved to Sierra Leone with the goal of revitalizing a pediatric hospital.
When Ajayi arrived, she found that the hospital’s plumbing was broken and there was no running water.
Before she could focus on high-level improvements, she would first have to learn how to fix the pipes — which she did, starting with a hand-drawn map of the building’s water supply.
In her view, “every problem is like that,” Ajayi says. Once you understand the steps you need to take, “you diagnose it, and you start to do things.”
That problem-solving mindset has always been “the way my brain likes to work,” Ajayi says.
“For people like us who are trying to do big things and complicated things, I think understanding the context and getting as far upstream as possible and then figuring out how it all connects is such an important part of problem solving,” Ajayi says.
Her perspective on leadership: ‘You’ve got to be willing and curious’
According to Ajayi, one common trait leaders and innovators possess is a “fundamental belief that you can actually make things better and different” — and they don’t feel “constrained” by the status quo.
It’s equally important for leaders to have a sense of “humility and curiosity,” she says.
While working in Sierra Leone, Ajayi found that local families were reluctant to bring their children to the hospital.
After speaking to people in the community, she realized that the issue was a lack of trust: many health-care workers “never bothered to explain” how the hospital system worked.
“We had not spent the time to go to people, to explain to them what we were doing, to give them agency and choice,” she says.
That was a major lesson for Ajayi: “In health care, it is not enough to build it and expect people to come. You have to go to them.”
“You have to meet them on their terms, have to solve for what they’re solving for,” she continues.
That knowledge informs the way Ajayi leads Cityblock Health, where her goal is to “meet people where they are.”
“You’ve got to be willing and curious and tenacious and patient and humble enough to recruit help, to help you understand all the different steps along the way,” she says.
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