Kite Oxford

Co-Director
Torben Heinsohn

Originally from Hamburg, Germany, I studied Medicine in Cambridge and Oxford. Early on I developed interests beyond my limited curriculum and started exploring ways of bettering people’s lives through approaching a system instead of an individual. Whilst at Cambridge I worked on health education, community health care, HIV treatment adherence and ophthalmic service provision in Tanzania as part of the Cambridge Development Initiative and experienced for the first time the impact that students can have in development. I used the experiences gained when in 2016 I went to volunteer in the refugee crisis in Northern Greece, helping build a humane home for refugees as part of Better Days and supporting the development of structures of refugee self-organisation in other camps. Having done research on vaccines, HIV and Tb I learned to appreciate the interdependence of factors that allow humans to flourish. Over all this time what inspired me most was meeting people who were unhappy with the world they found themselves in and out of empathy decided to get up and do their part to change it. Co-founding Kite Oxford I am hoping to inspire others to do the same, to empower students in the UK, Kenya and beyond to develop new ideas to tackle the challenges faced in disadvantaged communities.