Profile of Dr. Jessie Stone
If ever there was a tale of how one’s passion (for kayaking!) led them down a path to an unexpected accomplishment, this is it.
By Peter Aronson
The Practical Altruism Project
April 6, 2025
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Dr. Jessie Stone is the rarest of medical doctors: she does not practice medicine, yet she helps more people with their health than she ever could have if she had donned a stethoscope or a surgical mask and scrubs.
Dr. Stone, now 57, is the founder of the nonprofit Soft Power Health (SPH), a full-service medical clinic in Uganda that has grown from a modest start to where it now treats 38,000 patients a year and provides outreach/community medical care and education to an additional 20,000. This non-profit, founded by Dr. Stone about 20 years ago, now has a staff of 100 Ugandans - doctors, nurses, lab technicians, administrative staff - providing essential medical care in eastern Uganda, near Lake Victoria, in Kyabirwa Village.
“Jessie has with SPH established a beautiful program, which provides the health services that we all wish would be the level of care here in Uganda,” said Dr. Margrethe Juncker, who works with a nearby Ugandan hospice program and collaborates with SPH on patient care. She said SPH has filled an essential gap that the Ugandan government’s failed medical system cannot fill.
A winding path … from kayaking to medicine to Uganda
Dr. Jessie Stone’s path to Uganda was as unexpected as the accomplishment she has achieved in a country void of an established medical infrastructure.
In a circuitous way, Stone’s love of the outdoors led her to the medical world and Uganda.
She grew up in a suburban house in Purchase, New York, about an hour outside New York City, but she was really a child of nature - fishing, playing with frogs and salamanders, riding horses and ponies, and summers swimming, sailing, canoeing and camping in Maine, then, in the late 1980s, on to college at UC Berkeley, where she couldn’t seem to stay indoors. She became a white water rafting guide in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
“I felt an instant connection with the water - the intimacy and sensitivity to this incredible force of water had me hooked right away,” she said.
She spent college summers leading rafting trips in California and Oregon and eventually became proficient enough where she landed a job guiding rafting trips on the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe. All this rafting and paddling exacerbated an old shoulder injury that required surgery. The surgery and healing process led to Dr. Stone’s realization, in the early 1990s - that she could become a doctor and really improve people’s lives.
“You can learn a skill and … make a difference,” she said. “This is what I wanna do.”
After healing, Dr. Stone pursued her dual passions in life: A desire to become a doctor and her newfound love for white water kayaking, which she transitioned to from rafting. She found it difficult to stay out of the water.
“During medical school, in my free time, I was kayaking whenever I could,” she said.
During her fourth year in medical school, she did a three-month rotation at a hospital in Kikuyu, Kenya, a town about 12 miles outside Nairobi. She called this a “huge eye opener for how medicine is actually practiced in Africa,” citing the lack of affordable, comprehensive medical care.
“A lot of people have really serious medical problems and they wait and wait and wait” for treatment, she said. “And then they don’t have the money to pay for the care. They have a chicken to exchange for care and just things like that. The sheer number of patients that the doctors at the clinic saw on days was extraordinary.”
She found this deeply troubling and compelling, but placed it in her memory bank, because she felt the water beckoning as she graduated from medical school.
“I talked to my dean and said, ‘I really want to go kayaking right now. I have this great opportunity,’ ” she said, adding that she told the dean she planned to return to medicine at some point.
She joined the freestyle kayaking rodeo circuit and did some extreme kayaking races. She then focused on freestyle kayaking, over time becoming a six-time member of the U.S. Women’s Freestyle Kayak Team and representing the U.S. in six world championships. She earned sponsorships. She raced. She taught. She led trips. She loved it. But there was a twist in the road along the way.
Kayaking and a curious mind led to the game changer
In the early 2000s, while on a kayaking expedition on the Zambezi and Nile rivers in Uganda, a colleague came down with malaria. This led Dr. Stone to wonder: “If he got malaria and he has access to all this prophylaxis and modern technology, what happens to the local population?”
She wanted to find out.
She partnered with a woman from a local Uganda village, Kyabirwa, just a few miles from Lake Victoria, where it fed into the Nile. They canvassed local towns, making 50 home visits, asking locals if they knew how malaria was transmitted, how often family members contacted the disease and if they owned mosquito nets.
“The incredible thing was that we did this survey of 50 homes and not a single person understood how malaria was transmitted,” she said, even though malaria was and still is the single biggest infectious disease killer in the country.
Working with the local mayor in Kyabirwa, they decided to offer a malaria education program for locals, explaining low-cost prevention methods. Then a neighboring village wanted the same training, then so did other local villages.
“It was sort of like this domino effect,” Dr. Stone said. She returned to Africa a second time to continue this effort and that’s when the mayor of Kyabirwa offered to donate land for her to build a medical clinic.
“I mean, I knew nothing about building or running a medical clinic, but it was a great idea,” she said, explaining that it fit with her ideals of helping others through medicine, even if she wasn’t practicing as a doctor.
Never one to shy away from a challenge, she returned to the United States and got to work, raising $25,000 by having a fundraiser at her father’s art gallery in New York City, then returned to Kyabirwa and built, with local workers, the Allan Stone Community Health Clinic, naming it after her dad. (Allan Stone was a well known art dealer in New York, who died in 2006. Dr. Stone explained that she lives off her inheritance from her father, allowing her to run the nonprofit, Soft Power Health, and the clinic for no salary.)
With the mayor and the entire town watching, the doors to the clinic opened on January 19, 2006, a modest four-room structure with a doctor’s room, a laboratory, a treatment room and a nurse’s station where payments are received and prescriptions are dispensed. Dr. Stone said it was an incredibly exciting and nerve-wracking day, but “now the hard part really started - managing and keeping the clinic running.”
In the beginning, with just a few employees - one doctor, two nurses and one laboratory technician - the clinic saw 10-12 patients a day.
“It took several years before the community came to trust and recognize our service as good and reliable,” Dr. Stone said. Once that happened, the patient population grew exponentially.
Filling a void
The need for good medical care and health information was so great that the clinic’s offerings and outreach programs grew in similar proportion. As patients asked about family planning, an outreach program was started to educate the local population about contraception and to supply items needed. A few years later, seeing that malnutrition was a major issue, education outreach began on this topic, likewise for nutrition and gardening (including teaching organic methods), then domestic violence and physical therapy.
“In an impoverished community like Kyabirwa, where a majority of its population are well under the poverty line, farming for subsistence survival, fishing for a few bucks, SPH comes in and meets all their medical needs,” said Anna Kalumuna, the director of a local surgical center. “From family planning, to caring for malnourished babies, to gender-based violence, treating malaria, HIV … all this while managing a patient referral process.”
Today, the clinic sees approximately 160 patients a day, and as many as 190-220 patients on Monday, its busiest day, with lab tests and prescriptions, all for the equivalent of $6 per patient, said the clinic’s current director, Dr. Henry Prosper, and if a patient can’t afford to pay, they are not charged. He said the Allan Stone Clinic is the second busiest medical facility in that part of Uganda, after the government’s regional hospital, but the best option, because the clinic provides testing and drugs in a timely fashion at a very low price.
In 2024, the clinic and outreach programs treated and counseled almost 60,000 individuals.
Stone said the Ugandan government’s medical system is so broken that patients who can’t afford to pay for care upfront, as is the custom in the country, die waiting for care.
“So we try to make sure that doesn’t happen to people,” she said.
She said, fortunately, there is little intrusion from the Ugandan government and that patients sometimes travel great distances, even from other African countries, for treatment. Dr. Juncker said it is the best treatment option for an area where 4.5 million people live.
The UN “calls for access to healthcare when you need it, where you need it and for an affordable price,” Dr. Juncker said, explaining that the clinic has “shown the way to how this goal can be reached.”
Dr. Stone said she spends approximately three to six months a year in Uganda, visiting three times a year and dividing her time between the clinic and outreach. “I love visiting patients at home and seeing how they are doing - the challenges they face and how we can work with them to address their challenges,” she said.
She said she hopes to start a cervical cancer screening program, because she said, it “is the biggest cancer killer of women in the developing world and in Uganda, in particular.”
When she’s in the U.S., Dr. Stone’s major role is working with clinic staff via zoom calls and fundraising. The current budget of $530,000 comes from foundations and approximately 150 individual donors.
Dr. Stone’s love of kayaking has never died down, as she has continued to compete all across the country. However, for the first time in 18 years, she was unable to attend the U.S. Women’s Team trials because she had to fundraise for Soft Power.
“It was a hard but necessary decision,” she said.
She explained that raising money is her most important job. She said her succession plan for Soft Power includes an effort to raise $10 million as an endowment.
“I am happy to hear any suggestions about how to do that,” she said.
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To learning more about Soft Power Health and the clinic it runs in Uganda, please visit their website at: https://www.softpowerhealth.org/