Nonprofit founder, children’s book author, physician: A triple threat against COVID-19

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Karen Tsai ’13 was working as a resident in internal medicine at LAC + USC Medical Center, where she got a firsthand view of the city’s rapidly worsening infection rate. But when hearing about the dire situation her friends and colleagues in New York were facing, she knew she had to help.

So in March 2020, Tsai and a colleague founded Donate PPE, a nonprofit that aimed to amass personal protective equipment (PPE) donations and disperse them to hospitals and other places that needed them the most. What she anticipated to be a local distribution network soon grew to a national organization that has sent face masks, face shields, gloves and other protective equipment to nearly every U.S. state, plus Uganda.

Donation stations

Tsai, who majored in biological sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, grew up in Arcadia, California, close to the university she would later attend. After graduating from USC Dornsife, Tsai headed to the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, where she earned her M.D.

Back in Los Angeles for her residency, Tsai remained in contact with her Stony Brook classmates, whose stories about the dire lack of PPE in New York prompted her to team up with a Bay Area colleague, one who had a background in web design, to see if they could get such equipment to people who needed it. Along with Tsai’s brother Kevin, they set up a small web platform to connect individuals with extra PPE — woodworkers with some spare N95 masks, for example — to health workers who needed it.

When the project gained national attention, larger corporations, like the Ford Motor Company, began to contact the organization, offering up their extra face masks, shields and other equipment. Soon, Donate PPE was able to supply equipment to other venues, such as schools, food banks and homeless shelters.

Tsai was initially daunted by the thought of having to write to CEOs or coordinate logistics, but she quickly got over her fear of the unknown.

“This pandemic really taught me to think outside of the box. Use your skill set and don’t be afraid to ask for help. When things get rough, and people can come together, that’s when magic happens,” she says.

Teaching children about COVID-19

But while equipment is necessary to fight the virus, the goal is to stop its spread, and one of the best ways is through education, Tsai says. She adds that her parents are from Taiwan, and that country’s use of COVID-19 prevention education has helped keep virus rates relatively low.

Thus, Tsai decided to create a book to educate children about the virus. She reached out to illustrator and cartoonist Guy Gilchrist, the cartoonist who created The Muppets comic strip featuring Jim Henson’s iconic characters, to help her create a book that would be educational without being patronizing or frightening. The result is Monster Dance (Madeleine Editions), a multimedia ebook that tells the story of a girl and a dog conquering their fears of a “monster” lurking outside their home. Tsai, who served as a consultant for the book, said that creating the work as an e-book was more in keeping with the online nature of learning children have been experiencing lately.

“It has some graphics, some words and some animation that can capture a child’s interest as well as a child’s attention span,” she explains.

A portion of the proceeds of the book were donated to PPE efforts, some books were donated to children’s hospitals and some books were sold at a low cost to classrooms, she says.

Spotlight on humanitarianism

Tsai’s efforts during the pandemic captured the attention of one of her former USC classmates who works with the Television Academy on the Emmy Awards. Telling Tsai that the academy was looking for a way to honor frontline and essential workers, her classmate urged Tsai and her brother to apply to present an award. The siblings were shocked to be picked but happy to participate. Thus, in scrubs and stethoscopes rather than a ball gown and a tuxedo, Tsai and her brother presented the award for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series. (Winner: Billy Crudup in The Morning Show.)

“It was great, and it gave us a platform and a voice to address the general public about what you can do, individually, to prevent the spread of the pandemic,” she says.

Tsai has been thinking about the future of her organization once the coronavirus pandemic ends. Her group might shift to education, teaching people about better approaches to stockpiling, and how to distribute stockpiles so that they are in the right place when needed. Regardless of the direction, she says, preparedness will be essential for when — not if — another superbug or pandemic happens.