#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Tarik McMillan & Tamara Mohammed, Co-Founders, Greater Changes
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Creating Culturally Intentional Mental Health Services
Tarik McMillan and Tamara Mohammed founded Greater Changes with the goal of making mental health services accessible for people, no matter their background. We spoke with them about the sometimes challenging process of developing a telehealth platform, ‘Change’, their experiences fighting stigma and operating out of the U.S. Virgin Islands, and their goals for 2024.
Tell us about your backgrounds. What led you to create Greater Changes?
Tarik: Tamara and I are both licensed professional counselors, and I got into this work as a result of not having a childhood therapist who truly understood me. When I moved to Florida as a child, I had a thick accent, and I was bullied for it. When I got into therapy, I finally got comfortable enough to use my accent and my therapist laughed. I was shocked, and from that moment, I knew that I wanted to create a space where people felt safe to open up and be themselves. After I got my master’s degree, I moved back home to the U.S. Virgin Islands, and during that time, we experienced two category 5 hurricanes. I got into crisis counseling, and it was through these conversations that I realized people had experienced so much devastation but didn’t want to talk about it due to the stigma around therapy. What helped tremendously was that I looked like them, and could relate on a deeper level. Seeing the impact that these interactions had on the people I met after the storm, motivated me to begin my own practice. I met Tamara in 2018, and we’ve been building Greater Changes with cultural intentionality ever since.
Tamara: Both Tarik and I have personal stories that led us to our field. For me, I watched a family member suffer from severe mental illness and watched them go through this endless cycle of being on their medication and being stable, to going off their medication, being in crisis, and going to the hospital. I thought there had to be something better out there to treat this cycle. From there, I became interested in psychology, I moved to Florida to attend college in 2000, and I've worked in the mental health industry ever since. But my passion was always to practice at home again in the Virgin Islands. Meeting Tarik aligned perfectly with our shared goal of enhancing access to mental health services, particularly in the Virgin Islands, where in-person providers are scarce, and many people have to utilize telehealth. So we set out to build our own thing.
Have you run into any challenges while developing your platform?
Tarik: While we’ve been able to get very close to finishing our platform, it’s been quite a challenge finding reliable developers in the area. Fortunately, a high school friend who became a developer was able to assist us, but the reason we haven’t been able to launch yet is due to the complexities of compliance. Building a platform that is HIPAA compliant requires a developer with the necessary expertise in that area. We hope to connect with a capable developer soon and will launch in the coming months.
What’s been your experience navigating the fundraising landscape in the U.S. Virgin Islands?
Tarik: This issue is multifaceted for us. Most of the capital that we have been able to access at this point has been from our participation in Accelerate VI’s startup program. Our legislature passed a bill that provided funding to the organization, which allows them to then fund startups that go through their program. The local government in the Virgin Islands is generally cautious and hesitant about startups on the island and I think it’s because they don't fully understand the importance of startups to the economy. That’s a huge reason why there’s little funding from the local government being offered to startups here.
The other thing we’ve noticed, based on meetings I've had with investors, is the ignorance that comes with not knowing much about the Virgin Islands in general. Investors often ask if we have the same currency as the U.S., how the laws on the island work, and if we can scale. In addition to pitching and seeking funding, we also have to spend time assuaging all of these concerns.
I can also recall being on a call with someone who wasn't in the mental health field trying to explain the aspects of mental health to me. The assumption that there’s no possible way that this Caribbean founder is an expert in his field is a stigma that is pretty unique to us.
Being a telehealth platform and counseling service, how are you able to find and connect with your clients across the island?
Tarik: We’ve just opened an office space in the Virgin Islands where we offer in-person services. Before that, we were only providing virtual services, but we wanted to cultivate a community where the idea of therapy wasn’t scary, lonely, or overwhelming. The office space will also serve as a telehealth hub that will provide access to people who may not have working WiFi. Unfortunately, in the territory, connectivity can be very spotty or simply won’t work. If there’s a power outage, internet providers that don’t have backup generators here will fail to provide access. Our telehealth hubs aim to mitigate that and serve as a backup plan.
What are your goals for Greater Changes moving forward?
We talked about the development of our telehealth hubs, but we also want to partner with more small businesses and provide their employees with access to mental health care, specifically for job-related stress. Finally, we want to increase the amount of individual providers on our platform. The overall goal of Greater Changes is creating and improving the systems necessary for people in the Virgin Islands and the surrounding Caribbean to live healthy lives.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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