Outside Our Walls

Today, UC Health teams continue to shape lives abroad—and here at home in Greater Cincinnati.

• The Village Life Outreach Project—founded by Dr. Chris Lewis in 2003, imagining global health. The initiative centers on local voices to co-create sustainable, community-led solutions.
• More than 1,000 multidisciplinary volunteers have helped open the Roche Health Center in Tanzania and build lasting systems of care and education.

Learn more about the Village Life Outreach Project and the ways that UC Health experts are making an impact in communities far from Cincinnati.

A Legacy Built on Service

At UC Health, we believe that health care doesn’t stop at the edge of our campuses. It travels across cities, across cultures, across continents. For more than 20 years, our teams have gone outside our walls to bring care, learning, and compassion to communities in rural Tanzania. It’s not just outreach. It’s partnership. It’s purpose. And it’s personal.

It began in 2003, when Family Physician Chris Lewis, MD, then a resident at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, took a leap that would change his life—and hundreds of others.

“My parents were big followers of Martin Luther King, Jr., and there’s a quote from him that I love that says, ‘Life’s most urgent and persistent question is, what are you doing for others?’ So, I always, from an early age, wanted to use my life and my career to try to answer that question,” Dr. Lewis said.

That answer took him to Tanzania for a month-long rotation in global health. What he saw, experienced, and learned there sparked a commitment that would grow into a movement.

Why Tanzania?

When Dr. Chris Lewis first traveled to Tanzania as part of a global health program during his residency, he was immersed in a vastly different medical reality. In rural areas, access to care was nearly nonexistent. Just one doctor served every 25,000 people.

But what struck him most wasn’t just the need. It was the spirit.

“To work and serve alongside some great clinicians there… my life was forever changed,” he recalled.

Fueled by that experience, Dr. Lewis returned to Cincinnati with a vision: to create sustainable partnerships rooted in dignity, respect, and shared purpose. Within a year, he founded the Village Life Outreach Project, a nonprofit that now links UC Health and the University of Cincinnati with three Tanzanian communities.

“People materially living in very poor conditions but are some of the wealthiest people on this planet in terms of their wealth of spirit and community.,” Dr. Lewis explained.

From the very beginning, Villiage Life was about collaboration—not charity. Listening, not prescribing. The organization exists not to impose solutions, but to walk alongside local communities in identifying and addressing their own health priorities.

From Vision to Impact: Decades of Collaboration

What began as a single trip has grown into a legacy of trust, innovation, and measurable impact.

Since 2003, nearly 1,000 volunteers from UC Health and the University of Cincinnati have traveled to Tanzania through Village Life. These teams have helped deliver essential services in primary care, nutrition, pediatrics, pregnancy and delivery, orthopedic care, and tropical disease research. But their influence goes far beyond clinical work.

In 2011, that partnership reached a milestone: the opening of the Roche Health Center, the first permanent health facility serving more than 20,000 rural Tanzanians. It wasn’t just a building—it was a breakthrough. For the first time, patients had consistent access to care. And local healthcare workers had a place to train, grow, and lead.

“Everything is driven by the needs voiced from the community,” Dr. Lewis said. “We don’t come in as outsiders and tell people what we think they need. We depend on them to tell us what the problems in the community are and what their views on how to solve them are. And then we partner together.”

This approach has helped redefine what global health can look like: not a one-way street, but a shared road to equity, education and empowerment.

Who’s Involved: A UC Health-Wide Effort

Global health at UC Health isn’t a side project, it’s a shared endeavor. Over the years, Village Life has welcomed volunteers from every corner of our academic medical system: physicians, nurses, pharmacists, medical and nursing students, public health experts, engineers, business leaders, educators, and more.

Each year, UC-affiliated teams spend up to four months on the ground in Tanzania, working side by side with community partners to provide care, conduct research, and train the next generation of healthcare professionals—both American and Tanzanian.

The results aren’t just felt in East Africa. They ripple back to our Cincinnati community, where students and providers return with renewed purpose and a global perspective.

“That is something so powerful to behold,” Dr. Lewis said. “When you come back and you see that nursing student doing their job with a little more cultural competency, a little more understanding of the way the rest of the world works because of their time in Tanzania.”

This work builds not just healthier communities—but a more connected and compassionate healthcare system, here and abroad.

Looking Ahead: Boundless Possibilities

Even a global pandemic couldn’t pause the momentum. Through COVID-19 and beyond, Village Life has remained a source of continuity and hope, for Tanzanian communities and for UC Health volunteers alike.

Now, with years of partnership behind them, Dr. Lewis and his collaborators are thinking even bigger: more volunteers, more services, deeper roots in education and research. The goal is clear—expand impact without losing the soul of the mission.

“I am most proud of the thousands of volunteers, on the Cincinnati and U.S. side and the Tanzanian side, who have come together in a spirit of unity to solve real-world problems and improve people’s lives,” said Dr. Lewis. “We’ve learned from each other. We’ve seen our shared humanity.”

As UC Health continues to see healthcare as boundless, Village Life proves that delivering care can also mean co-creating a better world—one relationship, one clinic, one community at a time. “I’m fond of saying that raising awareness is the precursor to spreading love,” Dr. Lewis reflected.

How You Can Join

Learn more about supporting Village Life Outreach Project by visiting https://villagelifeoutreachproject.org/take-action. “This is work anyone can be part of,” Dr. Lewis emphasized. “We’ve built something real—and we’re just getting started.”

The same physicians impacting care around the world are here for you right here in Cincinnati—delivering expert, compassionate care every day. Choose care that goes beyond boundaries. Call (513) 475-8000 to schedule an appointment.