Discussed initially at tonight's 7/2/2020 Delegate's Meeting:Full proposal with amendments at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13cJJh1HiQK5m8PC-diO7-D_jBjNudpRD?usp=sharing2 July 2020
Name of Project: Test the People
Address: 5700 Martin Luther King Jr Way, Suite 1531
Phone Number: 415.338.9306
Email Address: jenny@renegade.bio
Website: https://testthepeople.org
Legal organization form of Project: For-Profit Public Benefit Corporation
Describe the proposed project.
renegade.bio is a Queer-owned and -operated Public Benefit Corporation. Founded in response to the pandemic, renegade.bio provides COVID-19 testing to underserved communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. This past Sunday, renegade.bio launched our first free public COVID-19 testing event at #PrideIsARiot (see TestThePeople.org). - we collected over 250 samples and delivered results to patients within 24 hours. Unfortunately, we were unable to secure funding for these essential public health endeavors from any of the entities that should be funding them: SF Dept of Public Health, Alameda County Dept of Public Health, nor California CDPH. There are those who want to donate to support our efforts, but as a Public Benefit Corporation (see Appendix A) we're unable to accept donations. Previous donations have been forwarded to a sister organization, Vaugn's Wings of Hope, which supports patients with a terminal illness and COVID in the Midwest. In order to continue providing free COVID-19 testing to underserved communities, we do indeed need funding for rent, payroll, equipment, reagents, and PPE. As such, we propose a crowdfunding campaign in collaboration with grassroots organizations committed to the health and well-being of our most vulnerable. Because: #WeKeepUsSafe.
How will the project promote Omni's charitable purposes?
COVID-19 impacts Black, Brown, and Indigenous people the hardest, due in part to unequal access to testing and other healthcare. We believe that the only way we’ll be able to get through this pandemic is via free, widely-available, accurate, recurring, and accessible testing. Our mission with Test the People aligns with several of Omni’s core missions, including “to provide relief to the poor, distressed and underprivileged” as well as “carrying on scientific research in the public interest.”
Attach a page showing the Project budget and the time period for the Project.
To support Omni Commons during this difficult time, we are proposing the high end of administrative fees - 15% of donations received through this campaign, which we intend to keep rolling as we plan and popup more free public testing events for as long as testing is needed. Donations received through this campaign will go solely toward paying for expenses incurred directly in putting on free public testing events - a sample budget from our first popup event is attached as Appendix B.
Your organization’s history, mission, and goals.
renegade.bio is a team of scientists, entrepreneurs, and community organizers, mobilizing in the public interest to provide rapid, cost-effective, end-to-end COVID-19 diagnostic testing for city and county public health. Longtime Omni organizers Jenny Ryan and Marc Juul are both full-time employees at renegade.bio, which was founded by Counter Culture Labs and Real Vegan Cheese member Craig Rouskey.
Renegade.bio is accelerating humanity’s capacity to test for novel pathogens such as COVID-19. Our work empowers an overburdened public health system to respond swiftly to epidemiologic crises by delivering fast, reliable, cost-effective solutions for community-based triage.
In collaboration with other labs, researchers, and organizations across the ecosystem of public health, renegade.bio is working day and night with a singular goal: to help make COVID-19 testing accessible to everyone in America, regardless of income—because we know it will take nothing less to end this pandemic.
Your organization’s current programs, activities, and accomplishments.
Since April, we have been conducting COVID-19 testing in NYC in our shared lab space at the New York Genome Center. Recently, we obtained our license to operate our Oakland lab, which is located at the Children’s Hospital ORI just ten blocks north of Omni Commons.
This past Sunday, renegade.bio launched our first free public COVID-19 testing event at #PrideIsARiot (see TestThePeople.org). - we collected over 250 samples and had results delivered to patients within 24 hours. We are conducting follow-up testing this Sunday, July 5th at the same site in Dolores Park, for which 200 of our registrants have registered so as to participate in generating data on community spread as these important mass actions continue. We will have an additional 250 spots available for this Sunday, so pre-register at the link above and help keep your community safe!
The geographic area and target population served.
Our labs operate in New York City and Oakland, California - however, we can and do accept samples from across the country. For our public testing popups, we are planning to provide popup testing at actions and in areas where testing is unavailable, inaccessible, or overloaded. Our first popup testing at #PrideIsARiot specifically aimed to serve Queer, Trans, Black, Brown and Indigenous People of Color. We hope to bring our next popup site to areas of East Oakland where testing is not currently widely available.
Estimate the number of people to be served.
Our capacity is 1,000 samples a day, so we hope to serve at least that many per month. However, since a single positive case can infect potentially hundreds of people, it’s impossible to quantify exactly how many people would be positively impacted by our testing.
The roles and responsibilities of staff, volunteers, and the board specific to this grant request.
Staff:
Community Outreach - research on communities and geographic areas in need of testing; outreach to potential community partners;
Marketing - manage crowdfunding campaign and social media; creation of multi-lingual marketing materials;
Operations - identifying accessible sites for sample collections; budgeting; site-based operational logistics;
Sample Collection - Samples are safely collected at mobile sites by Bay Area PLS, one of renegade.bio’s partner organizations;
IT - Ensuring the security and privacy of patient data in accordance with HIPAA - renegade.bio’s IT team manages the patient data portal, in which requests for patient samples are made by a requisitioning physician, and the LIMS (laboratory inventory management system), which manages the flow of individual samples from collection to results. Patient registration and results reporting are managed by Primary, our partner.
Clinical Lab Scientists - process samples and analyze results in our labs.
Volunteers are welcome and assist in greeting patients, ensuring the safe and hygienic flow of traffic at the testing site, and registering patients in our secure portal provided by Primary.
Describe your criteria for success. What do you realistically want to happen as a result of your activities?
renegade.bio would like to continue testing the community in open and accessible ways. Success is defined by testing underrepresented communities, nationwide. From Fruitvale to Immokalee, to the Navajo Nation, making testing available to at-risk, underserved communities is in our DNA. Success is defined by actual tests performed, and terminal success is achieved through a decrease in positivity rates in at-risk populations. Preventing outbreaks, protecting our communities, and delivering access to healthcare to folks from all walks of life is our mission.
How will you measure changes?
Changes in public health information, positivity rates, are based on physical healthcare data. Our website tracks overall statistics for a given action, and we work to make this data available to communities that need it. Facilitating knowledge during a pandemic, in which people do not have access to their ‘status’ means we can help communities build a safer foundation for a better future. Reports summarizing activities, including income and expenses for Test the People, can be furnished for Omni Commons upon request.
Who will be involved in evaluating this work?
Our results are reported to the state of California and patients’ County of residence as required by law. Our SARS-CoV-2 test is FDA-approved, and samples are processed in our CLIA-certified lab using positive and negative controls.
What will you do with the results of your evaluation? How will it be used to affect the Project?
For community transparency, we will post testing statistics and summary results on TestThePeople.org, including totals for negative and positive tests and demographic categories. These totals will not include any protected or personal health information. We are also required by law to share these totals with the state of California.
Provide copies of your governing documents, roster of officers, and a complete and filed IRS Form SS-4, showing the Project's separate existence as an organization.
Form SS-4 - see Appendix A
Governing Documents and Roster of Officers - See Appendix C
Provide a list of the Project's choice of funding sources to be approached and the text of all fundraising materials.
IndieGoGo rolling crowdfunding campaign pitch text to be sent when completed, and prior to campaign launch - see TestThePeople.org to get a sense of our messaging;
Potential grants as opportunities arise.