Drs. Jessica Beckerman + Ari Johnson

Jewish Values

“Nearly six million children are dying each year from diseases we know how to easily cure, because they do not get the care they need in time—because of where they were born, because of the color of their skin, because their parents do not have enough cash in their pockets. As Jews, we commit together to the Torah’s moral imperative: We will not stand idly on the blood of our fellow humans. Together, we have everything we need to end this injustice in our lifetimes, to save millions of lives.”

Jessica, Ari and their Global Impact

Millions of people living in poverty die every year from treatable diseases. Muso partners with governments to design, test, and scale strategies to create lasting impact for rapid, universal health care that keep every patient in mind. Through a community-based Proactive Care model, Muso deploys Community Health Workers (CHWs) to actively search for patients door-to-door to connect them to life-saving services early. Patients receive care with no out-of-pocket fees, and the sickest patients are evacuated to redesigned community health centers. Research has documented that Proactive Care communities achieved a ten-fold increase in access to care, and achieved and sustained the lowest child mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2024, Muso received the The Kristof Holiday Impact Prize which is awarded annually to organizations driving lasting, positive change in the world.

In 2005, while still an undergraduate at Brown, Jessica co-founded Muso with Ari and a team of Malians, an organization that works to eliminate maternal and child mortality in the developing world through a combination of health care and preventative medicine. Muso’s model for proactive doorstep healthcare was based on Beckerman’s experiences as an HIV researcher in Mali, where she regularly saw children dying of HIV and other preventable or curable illnesses. Beckerman earned a BA in international development in 2006 and returned to Mali as a Fulbright Scholar in 2007, continuing to build Muso’s model and team. She then joined Partners in Health as a project manager, designing health systems for marginalized patients. She earned a medical degree from the University of California at San Francisco in 2014 and was a resident physician in San Francisco until 2018. Since 2018, she has been an OBGYN in Oakland, CA. but her primary focus has remained Muso, which has grown to include 500+ staff, serving millions of patients, and cutting the child mortality rate ten-fold in Muso communities. Jessica was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2022.

Ari is an associate professor of medicine at University of California San Francisco Institute for Global Health Sciences and treats patients at San Francisco General Hospital. His research and global work focuses on curing delay in health care. Ari trained at Harvard Medical School and completed his residency at at the University of California San Francisco. A Draper Richards Kaplan Fellow, Ari has conducted research at the National Institutes of Health, the International Health Institute, the Medical Research Council of South Africa, Brown University, Harvard University, and the Kuvin Center for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases in Jerusalem. His research areas include health systems design, symptom-to-treatment time, healthcare financing, barriers to timely care, and strategies for improving population level morbidity and mortality through early access. Ari has published peer-reviewed articles and essays in the fields of infectious disease, health systems design, socioeconomic determinants of health, AIDS, and migration.

Jessica and Ari live with their family in San Francisco.