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Kwame Terra, founder and CEO of bEHR Health, joins Sean A. Russell to trace a path that started in a UCLA mindfulness research lab and led to building a health-equity platform for the Black community.
Terra's own vegan journey began around Cowspiracy in 2015, seeded a year earlier by research into psychoneuroimmunology at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center. That grounding in presence and systems thinking eventually led him to bEHR Health, an app that gives users a health score between 0 and 1,000 and feeds anonymized, community-owned data into what the company calls the Black Electronic Health Record, aggregating health insights by city and zip code to inform local interventions in real time.
Terra frames the mission around a stark number: a roughly six-to-seven year life expectancy gap between Black Americans and the general population, which across 50 million people adds up to 268 million lost years of time. bEHR Health's April launch event, the bEHRathon, invites 2,000 to 3,000 participants to log 7,000 steps a day for a month, enough collective distance to reach the moon, and the app is free to download for the first 30 days.