Sonia Sarkar is passionate about partnering with and amplifying the work of organizations building systems that enable true health and healing. Through Healing Capital, she supports community organizers and leaders who are holding healthcare institutions accountable and implementing community-owned visions for health data, dollars, decisions, and dialogue. As a Social Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Common Future, she has explored mechanisms to ensure that shifts from healthcare to health are democratized and equitable. Most recently, she was Health Justice Editor at The Nonprofit Quarterly as well as the Director of Social Homes and Health Equity at P3 Lab at the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute, where she partnered with social movement organizations to make visible the ways in those who are organizing to build power serve as social homes for their members. Previously, she served as Chief Policy and Engagement Officer for the Baltimore City Health Department, overseeing a portfolio that included community engagement and mobilization, city/state/federal-level policy, funding strategy, and multi-stakeholder partnerships to address social determinants.

She began her career with Health Leads, a national social enterprise instrumental in shifting today’s healthcare system towards addressing patients’ basic resource needs as a standard part of quality care. As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University, Sonia co-founded and served as campus coordinator for Health Leads’ Baltimore site, and also completed a term as a student member of the organization’s national Board of Directors. Sonia is a Voice Lab Fellow and a Truman Scholar. Previously, she was a Harvard Medical School InciteHealth Fellow, an AcademyHealth/Kresge Foundation Population Health Scholar, a Senior Fellow with the Millennial Policy Initiative’s Healthcare Commission, a Social Entrepreneur in Residence and Lecturer at Brown University, a World Economic Forum Young Global Shaper, and a member of the inaugural class of Public Interest Technology Fellows for New America. In 2017, she was named one of forty Culture of Health Leaders by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for her commitment to approaching the multidisciplinary work of health through an equity lens. She holds B.A. degrees in public health and international studies from Johns Hopkins University and an MPH and DrPH from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She is also a published poet and author, with work appearing in Health Affairs, Slate, the American Journal of Nursing and the Bellevue Literary Review, among others. A product of Austin, she’s also a huge fan of tacos, Tex-Mex, and barbecue.