Bouba Diemé

I founded Heart of a Giant Foundation in 2018 and we launched programs in 2020. I run it as Executive Director and sit on the board, after six years as Board President. A small core team covers 20+ sites across 10+ neighborhoods, and the work happens where people already are: churches, food pantries, senior centers, markets. We started in cardiovascular screening and grew into a cardiometabolic model covering hypertension, diabetes, and kidney disease.

Retention was the hard part, and it's what produces outcomes. Ours is 3.2 times the industry baseline. Returning participants improve at close to three times the rate of one-time attendees. Our community health workers are trained and know the people they're serving. People trusted them enough to return.

The part other places can use is the operating system. Paper forms designed for field conditions and black-and-white photocopying feed a private and secure record where every measurement ties to a dated event, controlled vocabularies replace free text, and severe blood pressure flags calculate on their own. We've identified and referred 47+ severe hypertension escalations, 22 of them in 2025, each through a coded pathway to a named physician. At $20K to $30K per emergency episode, the 2025 escalations alone represent an estimated $450K to $675K in avoided costs. The billing module waited for a signed contract, and we turned down a $35K per month integration engine in favor of open source.

So far we've reached 10,000+ people across all programs, with 1,800+ participants in our core cardiometabolic work, and secured $1.2M+ since launch.

On the policy side we work with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the Boston Public Health Commission. Clinically, with Boston Medical Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School. Programs run in the community's own languages.

Building something physical is a different discipline from running a program, and it's the one I trained in.

At Enbridge, March to August 2026, I led stakeholder relations and partnership development across a multistate Public Affairs, Communications and Sustainability (PACS) portfolio over $10M: six interstate projects in four US regions, Northeast, Northcentral, Offshore, and JV. I was the person regulators, municipal officials, and community groups dealt with, and the spokesperson during media and emergency response. Part of that portfolio budget I inherited, part I built. I left in August to move to Dakar with my family.

Before that, at National Grid from 2022 to 2026, I owned the budget, the team, and stakeholder management for clean energy equity programs across 20+ Massachusetts municipalities, including a gas rate case workstream.

This is where health infrastructure usually stalls.

From 2019 to 2022 I worked inside the Consortium for Energy Efficiency, a 40+ member coalition of utilities, national laboratories, and government agencies across the US and Canada, as Program Manager and Committee Co-Chair. The job was getting members with competing commercial interests to agree on common standards.

In West Africa, I co-founded and ran Yeelen Energy from 2015 to 2017, a self-financed energy management company working in Dakar and Bamako. That included roughly $100K of energy and equipment optimization for Sonatel/Orange Senegal across five sites. After we moved to Boston in 2016, I wound the company down from there. In the same period I advised Dalberg, the Rockefeller Foundation, the City of Dakar, and Impact Hub.

I started out on heavy industrial infrastructure as a student engineer with AngloGold Ashanti in Mali and South Africa, 2005 to 2009, then moved into electrical and telecoms engineering in South Africa at Broadband Infraco and Internet Solutions/Dimension Data, 2009 to 2014. From 2017 to 2019 in Boston I advised ePropertyCare on IoT and smart energy product strategy alongside part-time work at Apple, while starting the patient advocacy that became Heart of a Giant Foundation.