Venture Description: SIRUM will utilize real time, simple information technology to connect clinics and hospitals with charitable suppliers to ensure that usable medicine reaches under-served communities. SIRUM will accomplish this by acting as an online exchange that streamlines the process of matching demand for medicine in areas of need with the excess supply from pharmaceutical companies. The SIRUM online demand/supply matching solution reduces overhead, logistical, and administrative costs, permitting funding to go directly towards getting the right medicine to the right clinics.

Venture Origin: While following the relief efforts for the tsunami that devastated Indonesia, which I had just visited three months prior, I saw how supplies never reached areas in need. Billions of dollars of donated medicine â an amount large enough to fill warehouses the size of football stadiums - went unused due to coordination problems.

Innovation: Our venture is the first of its kind to design a web-based program to efficiently aggregate pharmaceutical medical donations for the free health clinics and the millions of people who use them annually. A few of our team members who are engineering majors are in the process of developing a unique, optimized algorithm that allows us to efficiently match the drug donations to clinics most in need.

Impact: Because our venture is community-based and very scalable, SIRUM will have a profound impact on not only the local community, but also the global community as our user base grows. Through a network of international clinics, we hope to help tens of thousands of people get the medicines that they need. Even more important will be our ability to successfully coordinate our drug distribution with relief efforts during times of local or int'l crisis.

Engagement with the community: Our Venture has engaged more than 10 pre-med students, who are interested in the health care industry, giving them experience speaking with executives at nonprofits, clinics, and pharmaceutical companies. We have also worked closely with Stanford professors, doctors at the Stanford Hospital, McKinsey consultants, and HP IT managers.

Impact and engagement progress since launch: Since our initial founding, the organization has grown to more than fifteen people dedicated to finding a solution. We have created a beta test site and invited several clinics around the bay area to participate. We have done extensive research on the current processes of donation in order to meet the needs of both parties. We are about to become incorporated and receive 501(c)3 status.

Impact and engagement strategy: We hope to leverage our series of connections of premed students, professors, doctors, and consultants to former FDA administrators and pharmaceutical executives. By releasing a service to the bay area, we hope to learn more about the process of matching clinics with pharmaceutical companies before growing the organization nationally. We hope to deliver our vision and our passion to all.

Awards: Grant from Youth Venture, Semi-Finals Stanford Social Entrepreneurship Challenge.

Money raised: Because it has only been one month since we received our seed grant, we have not had the opportunity to apply for any other grants. Right now we are focused on building a solid base.

Creative ways of raising resources: Rather than relying on foundation funding, our business model is subscription-based, allowing us to be sustainable without the need for the constant fundraising that plagues many similar organizations. After implementing the pilot phase, we will look for additional foundation funding.

Expansion plan for next 6 months: Over the next six months, our goal is to double the number of team members to over 30. We also hope to begin and sustain the pilot phase of our program, with at least three pharmaceutical companies and ten clinics participating.

Plans for sustaining the project: As we expand, we will be targeting younger team members (freshmen and sophomores). With regards to funding, our yearly pharmaceutical and clinic premium strategy will allow us to effectively sustain much of our funding in the future.

Vision for three years from now: Three years from now, our vision is for SIRUM to expand to a national level, supporting clinics and pharmaceutical companies across the country. By this point, we will be trying to include some international clinics in our service. This is especially important because at present, international clinics have no standardized way of getting medical donations.

Project impact: SIRUM is solving a large and growing problem. Over ten billion dollars of medicine are donated annually, but over half of these medicines are never used, while the other half may languish for up to a year in storage before being used. Besides being an incredible waste of money, millions of people die every year world-wide from the treatable diseases that these medicines would have cured. SIRUM is changing this problem into an enormous opportunity. By implementing our specialized technology to non-profits, SIRUM will be the first supply-and-demand information aggregator for medicine donations, streamlining the supply-chain of donations and drastically increasing their efficiency. By delivering an optimized and standardized way of requesting and receiving drugs, we allow doctors volunteering at free clinics to focus on, helping people, instead of wasting their time on the telephone and Excel. Because our service and information technology is very scalable, once SIRUM is fully functional, we intend to not just serve clinics, but to literally transform how donations are made. If we can make just a 1% improvement above the status-quo, we will have saved thousands of lives and helped countless more. The dream of this incredible impact is why we love and are dedicated to developing SIRUM.

Youth Venture movement - what it means and how you can contribute: SIRUM works with students by giving them experience helping the community. By empowering students to work with high-powered executives and faculty during their freshman and sophomore years, we help to foster a spirit of social responsibility that these students will carry for the rest of their lives. Instead of participating in ordinary, run-of-the-mill volunteering, these students are invested intellectually and are given a great deal of responsibility for the first time in their lives. They are working in a Silicon Valley startup where their very actions can save lives. In light of the mediaâs recent coverage of social entrepreneurship, SIRUM acts as a gateway organization, guiding people to jobs in the sector. Many students of our team join us considering careers in Management Consulting and Investment Banking, but leave with dreams of social startups, foundations, the WHO, and NGOs. The impact is visible everyday in the nearby East Palo Alto Arbor and Pacific Free Clinics. Running an organization with such a large potential impact and opening up a studentâs eyes to careers in the social sector is an intoxicating experience that has filled us all with a deep passion and sense of commitment. We hope that we can change othersâ lives as much as SIRUM has changed ours.