Our Mission
Founded in 2019, PurpLE Health Foundation is a women-led team working with survivors of gender-based violence, including survivors of human trafficking, domestic violence, and sexual assault. These survivors have typically experienced additional socioeconomic traumas, such as incarceration, homelessness, and having an undocumented immigration status. Through a trauma-informed, survivor-centered approach, we facilitate holistic healthcare delivery sensitive to survivors’ physical, mental, and financial health, while also developing and disseminating best practices in the field.
Our Vision
Our vision is to have PurpLE serve as a healthcare home for gender-based violence survivors across the country, and as a health equity research and training hub for optimizing the health of historically marginalized communities. Addressing gender-based violence improves care for ALL patients.
Our Story
Before co-founding PurpLE Health in 2019, Dr. Ravi was the founder and medical director of the PurpLE Clinic - a "clinic in a clinic" model piloted within a larger community health center in New York City. The clinic served as a primary medical home for people who had experienced human trafficking and other forms of trauma, including domestic violence and sexual assault. Its design was guided by feedback from community partners and those with lived experience, including sex trafficked women incarcerated on Rikers Island.
From 2015 to 2019, the clinic provided care to hundreds of individuals and received several national accolades, including recognition from the US Health Resources and Services Administration as a “Promising Practice” and grant funding from the US Department of Justice.
As the PurpLE Clinic pilot ended, Dr. Ravi reached out to colleagues she had partnered with while running the Clinic - each had spent years trying to help survivors of trauma connect with and thrive in conventional healthcare settings while navigating issues such as homelessness, intermittent incarceration, undocumented statuses, and food insecurity. They shared a belief that a survivor-informed healthcare delivery system was an unaddressed public health need. This collective expertise and the lessons learned from PurpLE Clinic helped design and inform what would go on to become the PurpLE Health Foundation.
