Her Story
About Sana
My journey started with me wanting to be a doctor. I got my undergrad in Biomedical sciences through Charles Drew University, the only historically Black university on the West Coast. I was student body president and helped develop a lot of different programming like interview clothing and food pantries. The university's located in Compton Watts, and we were able to really be influential in LA. I was born in India, so I'm a different type of minority, and I grew up in LA, and it was like a bridge I never saw before. I ended up doing refugee work from 2016 till about 2020 when COVID started. I would live in Greece half the time and then I would live in LA half the time. Through that work, I started thinking about why people in the West are so depressed when we have so many resources, and how people that might never see their families again, that are literally walking and swimming through countries, are wanting to live. While I was doing street medicine, working in the shelters across the board, because Greece is a central point with hundreds of thousands of refugees, I understood that community heals people. I worked primarily with young boys from 16 to 24, and I just started using alternative things that I knew from what my parents taught me to support them, since we didn't have any access to real medication. Three years ago at Sundance, we accidentally launched 8 Billion Voices in response to gender-based violence. For the last 3 years, we've been doing research on what works to heal communities. We've used somatic yoga, breathwork, frequency music, because healing isn't linear. I curate it based on the demographic, and I call it tricking people's trauma out of them. We have over 200 stories in our DNA from epigenetics, but we don't know how to interpret that or deal with that. Right now my work is in workforce development, looking at what you do before the hospital and after the hospital to not get sick. I'm looking at alternative holistic mental health approaches and whether that decreases generational trauma. I left my job a year ago at Charles Drew University in the International Office and focused on this, rebuilding everything from scratch.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Sana
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say to make sure that you're creating room for your inner voice, that space, whether it's breathing, whether it's walking, because that's the time we get to connect with our subconscious. I think that's why we're so busy, so we can't be controlled. Our roots, wherever you come from, whoever you are, have a lot of advice within you, but we don't know how to reach out for it or ask for it. I think it's about doing what you do best and going where you're welcome. You don't have to be anybody else, and you should really want to get to know who you are, because there's probably so much to contribute with just pause. I think it's my flaws that made me unique. It's really not my togetherness. I'm the person in the room that will create a problem, to be honest, but not in a bad way. I don't like bullying, and I'm not gonna tolerate it. When I was going through my divorce and found out my dad had cancer, I was patient zero. I went through it, and for me, I was like, it's do or die right now.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
As soon as you say Eastern medicine, it's like a turn-off, but we don't have enough right now for all of us. This is the first time our youth cannot do critical thinking because they have compassion burnout. They don't know how to process things. I'm looking at who to partner with and looking at how we can create this as part of education, whether it's in schools or for women. I worked with women after the fire here, and it was a crazy thing for me because nobody had told them it wasn't their fault, and that is all they needed to hear. I need to survive, so that's my big thing right now, looking at partners and investors. I'm creating a bridge that doesn't exist right now between Eastern and Western medicine.
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