Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
A podcast about practices to promote healthy lives featuring experts, businesses, and clients: we gather to share our stories about success, failure, exploration, and so much more. Our subscription episodes feature some personal and vulnerable, real-life stories that are sensitive to some of the general public.
Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
Beyond the Steps: Kwame Terra's Journey to Transform Community Wellness Through Technology
What happens when someone decides to walk over two million steps in a single month? For Kwame Terra, founder of BEHr Health, it became a transformative journey highlighting the power of movement to change lives.
Terra's incredible feat—averaging 66,000+ steps daily for 30 days straight—wasn't just about breaking records. It emerged organically from seeing BEHr Health users transform their lives through million-step challenges, with participants losing 20 pounds and reducing medications. Walking became more than exercise; it became a vehicle for community connection and health transformation.
The physical demands were immense. "One day I was on my feet for 19 hours," Terra shares, detailing the knee pain, Achilles issues, and fueling challenges he faced. Yet even amid this grueling schedule, he placed 66th out of 16,000 participants in a major 10K race. His dedication speaks to the urgency behind his mission: addressing the shocking 26-year life expectancy gap between predominantly white and Black neighborhoods in New Orleans separated by just three miles.
BEHr Health tackles these disparities through a unique community-based approach. Rather than developing technology in isolation, Terra involves the communities he serves as equal partners in designing solutions. The platform centers around a comprehensive health score measuring seven wellness categories while connecting users to local healthcare providers, resources, and motivating challenges.
"We're not just another health app," Terra emphasizes. We're a health equity platform." This distinction matters deeply in his approach, which focuses first on communities facing the greatest health challenges and then scales learnings upward. By targeting solutions specifically for Black communities, Terra's team develops more culturally responsive tools to benefit everyone.
Ready to join this movement? Download the BEHr Health app using access code "HEALTHYLIVING" to discover your health score and connect with this growing community. As Terra prepares for BEHr Health's official launch in October, his journey reminds us that sometimes the path to health equity begins with simply putting one foot in front of the other.
Intro for podcast
Here is the link for Sunday's 4 pm Pacific time Zoom meeting
Joe Grumbine, and today we have a very special guest by the name of Kwame. Tara. Kwame is a health tech entrepreneur, a public health advocate and founder of Bayer Health. He recently made history by walking over 2 million steps in 30 days to raise awareness for community-driven health solutions. Rooted in New Orleans and powered by purpose, kwame's building a future where health of Black communities is informed, inspired and well-directed. And that's quite an impressive little intro there. Kwame, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great, Joe. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's my pleasure. Kwame, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Joe. Thanks for having me. Oh, it's my pleasure. I would just love to hear from your point of view.
Speaker 2:Tell me a little bit about this. 2 million steps in 30 days, yeah. So I came up with the idea several months ago. Last year we had a few users complete 1 million steps on the app. So for those who don't know our company, we run a technology platform where we give users a health score and we also run steps challenges. So steps became a big thing within the Bear Health community and, like I said last year, one user did a million steps in May. He lost 20 pounds, he was taken off blood pressure medication and became a big story. And just I said last year, one user did a million steps in May. He lost 20 pounds, he was taken off blood pressure medication and became a big story. And just steps again became a big thing in the community. And then another user did it in July, Two users did it in August and another user did it in October, and so we all got to talking like you know what's the world record you think any of?
Speaker 1:us, We'll go to the top right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, why not? And you know, the funny thing is that the Million Steps Challenge was originally supposed to be connected to a fundraising campaign for the company. So I wanted to take a million steps to raise a million dollars for our company. And the person that I kind of asked to help me in that journey Again, he's the first one to do the million steps.
Speaker 2:He's a doctor here in New Orleans and it kind of lost the plot. We kind of got rid of the idea of raising money around it because he had such an incredible outcome around his million steps and everybody that did it after that again also lost 20 pounds and improved their overall health and so kind of, in a sense, we kind of brought back that same original plot, but this time with a bigger goal. And so on March 27th, just before the beginning of April, I decided that I would go after the world record to launch our official campaign for the launch of Bear Health. And so April 1st through April 30th, I was clocking 66 plus thousand steps per day. Wow, 30, 30 miles, 30 to 35 miles of walking per day that's a lot of walking.
Speaker 1:What else did you? Didn't do anything else, really right.
Speaker 2:No, I didn't really have time. One day I was on my feet for 19 hours, wow, you know. And when I was first planning it out I didn't have that much time to plan. I was thinking, okay, I can walk around this meeting, I can walk around this work. But eventually, once I started, once I realized I just literally wouldn't even have enough time in the day, I flipped my perspective to where I can work around this walk. I can work around this walk, you know, this meeting, so and so forth. So it it. It took me making it the number one priority for the month to to accomplish it for sure.
Speaker 1:So in this walk I, I, I'm sure you had some interesting experiences. Why don't you tell me just a couple of little anecdotes of this two million step walk, yeah?
Speaker 2:So, yeah, you obviously see a lot when you're walking, you're slowed down, you're paying attention. No more, you have to pay attention so you don't get hit by cars and things. But one of the first things I noticed and I don't know how interesting this is, but I thought it was interesting. You know, people honk at each other all the time, sure, and nine times out of ten when someone was doing something that caused another person to honk at them, they were waiting for a person, a pedestrian, to walk across the intersection, and that's when they were stopped and the person behind them obviously didn't know or wasn't aware that they were waiting on, you know, whatever's going on in front of them. And I just thought that was interesting.
Speaker 2:You know, again, like we, we assume that someone is just being an idiot because they're just a terrible driver, as many of us are. But I don't know every. Every time I saw somebody honk, it was because they were. They were um, so the person in front of them was waiting on somebody to cross the road. So I just I just thought that was interesting because, you know, we always assume that people are doing things for you know the wrong reason. But but usually people have pretty good reason to be doing what they're doing and before you, you know, honk at them or yell at them or critique them. Maybe think about why you would be doing the same thing in the same situation and you might stumble upon the fact that they're just trying not to hit another person walking.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. You know the old adage when you assume something, you make an asset of you and me, and I can't tell you how true that generally is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Another interesting thing I don't think people realized how much walking I had to do. So you know people would come on walks with me, obviously, and that definitely helped the journey for sure. And you know we'd walk for like three or four hours and they'd be absolutely beat, beat, you know, and but feelings particularly accomplished, right, they just walked four hours, that's, you know, a little little under 10 000 steps, um, or I mean a little under 20 000 steps, and they're like, oh, so you're pretty much almost done and I'm like just about a third, yeah, yeah, not even close, and so that that put things in perspective for me and also for other people.
Speaker 2:Um, just the sheer effort that it took, it's almost like doing a marathon every day it was just about but yeah, yeah if I was trying to run it, I would have been burning about 5 000 calories a day. Wow, which is just not not no, it yeah, it wasn't so I was burning about 5,000 calories a day, which is just not. No, it wasn't so.
Speaker 1:I was burning about 2,500 calories per day on top of my resting calories. Wow. So when you're going along doing this, you know people that do endurance sports often get plagued with injuries and things like that. How were you able to manage this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I mean I do have an endurance background. So I ran cross country and track in college and obviously all through high school. So, and I was training for a 10k. So the Crescent City Classic was coming up here in New Orleans major race, biggest race of the year for the city and I'm a part of a run club and we had all been really training for this for the past six months and so I was in good shape, I had my legs under me for sure, but I wasn't sure how my body would respond to all this talking and so I actually stopped training once April hit and I started this challenge, just to be cautious.
Speaker 2:And honestly, the first five days were absolutely brutal. The tendons on the kind of inner part of my knee both knees I mean I couldn't flex all the way without pain and and just kind of like discomfort. Um, that took about five days for my, for my legs to adjust to just the sheer volume and for that pain to kind of go away. Um, additionally, um, like, I was obviously burning a lot of calories and so keeping up with my fueling was a challenge for me. So I eat, I do intermittent fasting, so I typically eat.
Speaker 1:Not much room for that right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, yeah, I kind of went out the window in April and so there was maybe like day three or four where I would start getting sharp pains going through, you know, my head. And so now I'm getting concerned because I'm like, okay, I want to do this attempt, I want to raise this awareness for my company, but you know, is it worth the risk? Um, but, but I just got much better about about the feeling. People started bringing me food, uh and, and so that that definitely helped. But the main, the main thing that came up injury wise was actually, um, about a week, a week and a couple of days out from the Crescent city classic race. So the race was scheduled for April 19th, saturday, and, um, the Thursday, not the Thursday before, but but two Thursdays before that Saturday I was doing kind of like a cool down jog with with some of my run club team members and I couldn't push off without pain, like I couldn't. I couldn't run without pain in my Achilles, like sharp pain in my Achilles, and that's not something obviously you want to really play around with at all. And so I pulled up after like two laps and just got back to walking and I could walk with no pain. But for the next eight days I literally could not push off at all, like to the point where if I saw other people like running, I'm like, how are you doing that? It had really gripped me that much. And so, you know, I had once, you know, I was already considering not running, just to like not risk an injury Cause, even though I could maybe run. You know, I didn't want. That didn't mean that something wasn't on the verge of collapse, right. But then once the Achilles pain came up, I was pretty much like, oh, I'm not going to do it, but I still really wanted to.
Speaker 2:And the Friday before the race we were uh, my company, we were tabling at an expo kind of the expo, pre-race expo for the Crescent city classic, and there was a podiatrist there, um, giving a talk, and so I'm walking over to talk to the podiatrist, but literally right before I get there, a news interview stopped me because they saw me wearing a shirt that said walking to break a world record. And so we had a chat about that and they asked me you know, have I done the classic before? Am I going to be running tomorrow? I'm like, oh, I'm actually probably going to walk the whole race. You know, because I don't want to risk injury. I'm having some pain.
Speaker 2:So after that conversation I went over to the the podiatrist and asked him. I mean, I told him what I was doing. I'm like, hey, I'm walking this many steps a day. I'm already 18 days into it. Um, I'm having this pain in my achilles. Do you think I should even consider trying to run tomorrow? And he told me to just put a heel insert in right, just like a small lift, yeah, and make sure I'm stretching. So mind you again, I hadn't been able to run for eight straight days. Wow, I go grab, I walk to the, to the walgreens near the expo. I put in a heel insert in and all of a sudden I can run with no pain no way I'm so, I'm so serious.
Speaker 2:And then so that night, um, I went on the treadmill just to kind of test if I could get to my normal, normal pace. Uh, for, for, uh, for racing. And I got up I started getting some pain, like closer to my true race pace, so I decided I would kind of back off officially. But I ended up doing, uh, I ended up running that. That next morning at the Crescent City Classic I placed 66 overall out of 16,000 people and ran 37 to 42. Nice.
Speaker 1:Right on. That's awesome. Well, let's talk about your Bear Health. Tell me a little bit about the company and maybe, really importantly, what got you into it. Where did you come from that says I'm going to start a, a platform like this?
Speaker 2:yeah. So, um, you know, in undergrad my goal was to become a doctor, but early on in my academic career I was introduced to research and kind of developed an appreciation for addressing problems from the the root of the problem, not necessarily, you know, addressing the symptoms or once they've become.
Speaker 1:And that wouldn't make you a very good doctor.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, our healthcare system on some level is designed to manage and treat disease right, not necessarily create health Exactly. And so I'm just more passionate about that. And so, you know, after I graduated, you know, attend conferences related to science, health, social justice, and, like, I traveled all over the country doing this and just kind of deciding exactly you know how I wanted to spend my time here. And it wasn't until the COVID-19 pandemic that I really was like, hey, I need to come up with a solution to this, just like everybody else, devastated by the effect it was having on their country. And we just wanted to do something so that next pandemic or next challenge that we face, we're in better health, have a better outcome.
Speaker 2:And my first thought was I don't think we really know how bad we're doing. I know, we know we're not doing great. I know, we know we need to be exercising more and eating better, but I don't think we understand the short and long-term implications of our current health status. Like I don't think many people know that you can die from a heart attack at 40 years old, you know. And so I wanted to communicate that clearly to people.
Speaker 2:And so that's where I came up with the idea of a health score. I reached out to a technology company who had been working on it. We're going to health score and a technology platform to kind of communicate that to people. And so, yeah, I wanted to do two things I wanted to communicate that clearly to people, and then I also wanted a method or system to where I could follow up with people as they fall off after being educated or excited about their health, right? So you can imagine, someone goes to a major workshop and they learn all these things about their health and now they're super excited about being healthy.
Speaker 1:They go home January 1st yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then two weeks later, they're like back in their old habits and so that's fine, right, we still need those workshops. But how do we follow up with people? That's more than like a follow-up email three months later hey, how are you doing? You still doing, you're still on the, on the, the tips that I get. You're still working on the, the improving your health, like like we talked about.
Speaker 2:So I wanted something that people can see change on a daily basis. So the health score on our app every if you go on a run one day, your score is going to go up a few points. If you get two or three hours of sleep one night, your score is going to go down, and then, based on those changes, you'll receive messaging from our automated coach, as well as be able to connect with health care providers and resources on what we call Bear Connect. And so really, I just wanted a one-stop shop health partner for people, one to help you understand your current health status and then be able to connect you to resources, um and coaching that you need to to improve it wow, that sounds, uh, sounds powerful.
Speaker 1:I I at first I thought it was, you know like one of these, uh, you know, rings and things that just kind of track things but, you're actually, uh, offering solutions and um and resources connected to that.
Speaker 2:So yeah, absolutely. I'll also say to your point about the wearables. You know, and I've actually been thinking about it a lot lately when I came up with the idea in 2020, I immediately enrolled in a master's of public health program with a concentration in health equity. And, for those who don't know what public health and health equity are, public health is defined as the art and science of prolonging life, and then health equity is there to ensure that each person, no matter their socioeconomic status or what have you, gets the best chance they can get at, you know, prolonging their life. And so, with that health equity concentration, I learned about an approach to research and development called community-based participatory research, which basically involves you inviting the community that you aim to serve in as equal partners in a design and development of solutions that you are building for them. So, instead of just developing some technology and throwing it at people and hoping that some people use it, we engage the community from the very beginning. And it's not like, hey, you should download this app because we think it'll be great for you. It's what are you currently struggling with? How are you currently trying to solve that problem that might not be working and how can we help Right, and then we build a relationship, first and foremost with the users, and then ultimately you know everyone you know ideally is ultimately on the platform and we're able to track these trends over time. Part of what makes us different is that we aren't just another health app. We're a health equity platform, because all of our user insights go into this aggregate report that we call the health score report, and each month we look at these trends and use that to inform modifications to the platform as well as what kind of events and experiences we curate that promote health.
Speaker 2:And so the app is one part of the solution, but it's not the whole solution. And if, after my work was done, I look outside and I see a bunch of people obsessing over tracking their steps, counting their calories and, you know, comparing their heart rate variability and their VO2 max, I would not. I would not be happy. You know, like that, that's not the. To me, that's not, that's not health. But if I look outside and I see, you know, a group of women walking together or people having a healthy meal together, like a large community meal, like that would make me, I'd be happy with that, and we'll still be tracking it through the app. You know the improvements on health through the app, because we can't improve what we aren't measuring. But we're going to start focusing more on the experience with our company.
Speaker 1:So how did you target a community? We've got such a just a huge spectrum of of people and places and variables.
Speaker 2:So how did you narrow a community to target down? Yeah, so so we focus on the black community, primarily because one that's where the problem is closest to me. I'm trying to solve a specific problem, right, health disparities that exist in the black community, not necessarily, um, just health broadly. And when you think about the policies and the practices and the beliefs that created these disparities, they were very right and they were targeted and they were effective and very creative. Right, and how they, you know, created these disparities. And so, based on my education and training, the solution should be equally targeted, right, and it's not. This isn't like a political or racial thing. This is a problem that I'm interested in solving and, based on my understanding, the most effective way to solve the problem again, you know, ultimately the most effective way to solve health will be on an individual level. Right, I'm not in a position where I can, you know, do individual to shed, so I'm curating solutions informed by, by communities and cultures, very specifically the black community right now, and and so that's that. That's really why we focus on and the problem is is great here? Right, you know they're, they're.
Speaker 2:You take new orleans, you can, you can find disparities in life expectancy as great as 26 years between lakeview, lakeview and intermay here in new orleans. So lakeview's predominantly white neighborhood, the average life expectancy there is 80 years, right, a little bit above the national average. But less than three miles away, in Treme, life expectancy is 54 years. And so you know that Delta, right, that's, that's the urgent problem that I'm interested in solving and it's affecting the black problem that I'm interested in solving and it's affecting the black community the most, particularly where I am. And so, yeah, that's why I focus on the problem.
Speaker 2:And one of the fortunate things about focusing on, you know, I say the most dispossessed among us, is that what we learn in developing solutions for these communities, the learnings can scale upward right to other communities who are still dealing with health challenges, but maybe not quite as many. Right, but the learnings can scale up. If we, similar to you know, most companies kind of went out and just found the market that was most, you know, apt to engage with our solution, that was most apt to engage with our solution, then yeah, sure, maybe we'd be able to build a successful business. But, just like what happens all the time, the impact and the learnings and what we designed the platform to do wouldn't necessarily scale down to people with unique experiences that are leading to the greatest disparities, and so I think, for those two reasons, it makes sense to to focus on the community that we focus on so is this?
Speaker 1:is this regional, or are you you know, or or is this a broader scope as far as this community you're talking about?
Speaker 2:yeah, so right now we focus in new orleans, so our startup is based at xavier university of louisiana and, uh, you know, we're early, early stage company. Just, our app has been in the market for just over a year now. We've gotten up to about 2 000 users here in the new orleans area. But we have a we have a technical limitation currently, right so, currently we're only limited to one data set, and this is based on our relationship with our technology partner, and so I really wanted to be able to say that our current data set is reflective of this specific community. However, in about five months, we're going to be migrating over to our own independent platform. We've been able to raise some money, get some donations and such to make that migration, and at that point, we'll be able to stratify our data in unlimited ways, right so?
Speaker 2:By city, by state, by zip code, by partnering organization, by university, and so we'll be able to create tailored experiences, you know, within different communities, because each community is different, right? Just like each individual is different. We're starting at the community level. Each community is different, and so, you know, what I'm really excited about is being able to compare and contrast the health score reports of each community, right. So let's say, the average health score in New Orleans is 515, right, but the average health score in New York might be 610. What's going on in New York that's not going on in New Orleans, that we can maybe adapt to elevate the health status here.
Speaker 1:So how does somebody say somebody's listening to this, they're in your area, they qualify for your demographic. How? Does somebody uh engage this yeah.
Speaker 2:So I will say, as of right now, anybody anywhere can engage with the platform. We're not going to say if you're not in new orleans, you can't, you can't download the app, um, but so our beta app is out right now with our technology partner. So our technology partner is a company called Dacadoo, that's spelled D-A-C-A-D-O-O, d-a-c-a-d-o-o. It's a Swiss-based company and you can use access code HEALTHYLIVING to create your account. So when you go to the App Store either Google Play or the App Store download the app. It either Google Play or the app store. Download the app.
Speaker 2:It's going to ask you for an access code and type in healthy living and then you will complete your profile so name, location, height, weight, such and such, and then you'll be prompted to complete your initial health score assessment once you create your account.
Speaker 2:It's going to be about 12 questions from the seven different categories of health that we track. So we have physical health that's like your medical health, so blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, things like that, your physical activity, your nutrition, your sleep, mindfulness, mental well-being and substance use or self-control, and you're going to have a couple of questions from each of those categories in your initial assessment and, you know, get your score. It's going to be a number between zero and one thousand. Um, anything under, anything under 550 is considered fair or poor and and where we we see the greatest risk overall for for poor health outcomes. But 550 and above is considered good. Five, you know 610 is considered great, anything above 680 is considered excellent, and that's our ultimate goal is to get everybody to that excellent health status. You know, on some level we feel like the healthcare system keeps people, or gets people to about good or tries to get people to about good yeah.
Speaker 2:But our goal as a company is to get people to excellent health and you know, within each section, after you complete your initial assessment, you can complete the full assessment for each section as well. So you would go into that category and click update your answers and you'll complete the comprehensive assessment in that category to get the more precise score. So the more information you submit, the more precise the score will be. And then again, as you live your life, the score will change based on changes in your lifestyle. And then we ask people to update their answers once a month so that when we pull that report we can see how people are doing, just like a monthly check-in with yourself, with your health, and then we'll just try to improve the platform, improve the experience and see if we can bump that score, that average score, up next month.
Speaker 1:So you're talking about resources and different practitioners and vendors and things like that. What is the scope of that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so currently those, those resources are predominantly localized to New Orleans, right? So if you do come onto our platform right now, you'll see healthcare providers in the local New Orleans area. We do have some advertising partners that sell products and services nationwide, and so there will be promotions for that. We also do tons of challenges in the app. We just did a challenge where we gave away two tickets to Super Bowl 59. Tons of challenges in the app. We just did a challenge where we gave away two tickets to Superbowl 59. If you complete 59,000 steps in a week, you were entered in for a chance to to go to the Superbowl. There was. There was an additional opportunity within that challenge where, if you every 1000 steps past 59,000 in that week, gave you 10 additional entries, and so one person actually did 50,000 steps a day for 10 days during that.
Speaker 2:One of those tickets.
Speaker 1:Say that again. One of those tickets.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she did, all right, so that's really what we want to do. So, as opposed to saying, hey, everybody go take 10,000 steps a day for your health, let's curate a challenge that the ultimate outcome is a significant amount of people take more than 10,000 steps a day for their health and also can really discover the value of walking as a health-promoting activity, because a lot of people don't see it that way, but it is super powerful and people again have literally walked off their medications working with us over the past year.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, Wow Well, kwame, I really like what I'm hearing. It mirrors a lot of things that I'm working towards, really exemplifies what this podcast is all about, and so I'm glad that we were able to find each other here. And so I'm glad that we were able to find each other here, and can you give us really your elevator pitch as far as how people can reach you and all that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I encourage people to follow us on Instagram. You can follow my personal page it's Kwame Terra, k-w-a-m-e-t-e-r-r-a, and then follow our company on Bear Health it's at B-E-A-M-E-T-E-R-R-A, and then follow our company on Bear Health it's at B-E-H-R Health and then definitely download the app, get your health score. We're planning something big for the official launch. I'm not going to give any details because we're building it kind of in a community way, right? So you have to, on some level, receive a personal invitation and you can receive a personal invitation if you're a user on the app. But we're planning something big for the official launch of Bear Health in October, so definitely something to be a part of. Another warm record to Tim.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Well, I appreciate you coming out here and joining the show, and feel free, if there's any updates or developments you want to come on back. I'd love to hear about your progress.
Speaker 2:Sure thing. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:You bet this has been the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and we will see you next time.
