Arlene Samen, APRN

In 1997, after 35 years as a nurse practitioner specializing in maternal and fetal medicine, Arlene was asked by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to save the lives of mothers and their newborns in Tibet, where one in ten newborns were dying of preventable causes. In 2004, she left her clinical practice to found One Heart World-Wide (OHW). While working in Tibet, Arlene developed the “Network of Safety” model, which brings life-saving care to expectant mothers and infants where the need is the greatest. In 2009, OHW extended the model to remote villages in Nepal and the Copper Canyon of Mexico. Over the course of her work, Arlene has survived political uprisings, earthquakes, and the SARS epidemic in order to provide women safe, clean deliveries, touching the lives of hundreds of thousands of women to date. Arlene has received many awards for her efforts; most recently she received the Global Thinkers Forum 2016 Award for Excellence in Women’s Empowerment. Arlene and her team are hard at work to bring OHW to scale in Nepal and globally.