Changing the World: Candice North ’04 addresses critical needs at home and abroad

Candice North ’04 of Carmichael, California, is a first-generation student who grew up in rural Montana. At Ripon College, she majored in biology. At the University of Arizona, she received her doctor of medicine degree in the global health distinction track. She now is a hospitalist, an internal medicine or family medicine physician who performs rounds on patients and coordinates inpatient care. She works at Sutter Sacramento Medical Center.

The Sacramento community was one of the first areas in the United States to be impacted by COVID-19. The nearby Travis Air Force Base was being used to provide care to passengers exposed to COVID-19 on a trip with Princess Cruises.

The community also was the first in the United States to socially distance, so residents there were socially isolated longer than anyone else. “When you add that to the unique experience of being a frontline worker from the start, it was quite a mentally confining time,” she says.

She has gone on numerous medical missions to Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya and Nepal. Through the pandemic, her efforts continued on her nonprofit Building One Community at a Time (BOCAT) which works to enroll orphaned children in Nalerigu, Ghana.

She and her husband, Mo Cisse, maintain the website www.bocat.net about the project and work to actively fund the education of orphans. “Although the pandemic definitely was a barrier to some efforts to expand the program, we have acquired land to someday build an actual orphanage there,” she says.