Office of Field Education and Practice
Field education and hands-on practice are fundamental components of public health education, providing students with real-world experience and the opportunity to apply theoretical knowledge in practical settings.
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Renny Honda is a recipient of the 2026 Gareth M. Green Award for Excellence in Public Health Practice.
The most rewarding part was the back-and-forth between theory and practice: building a framework from the literature in Boston, then sitting with patients and community health workers in Laikipia to hear what the data couldn’t capture, and returning to deepen it into something The Leo Project could use in real practices.
Partner Organization: The Leo Project
Location: Laikipia County, Kenya
In Laikipia County, Kenya, cancer rarely announces itself early. By the time a diagnosis arrives, treatment is often out of reach, financially, geographically, and emotionally. The Leo Project is working to change this. Based in Nanyuki, The Leo Project delivers integrated primary care, health education, and community outreach to underserved populations across Laikipia, building the kind of trusted relationships with patients and community health promoters that the formal health system has struggled to establish. Their next frontier is cancer: a dedicated cancer center, opening in 2027. This project was built around a simple premise that meaningful change in cancer care requires understanding not just the health system, but the community living inside it.
Working alongside The Leo Project, Renny, with classmate Sonali Verma, combined landscape analysis, patient journey mapping, and qualitative fieldwork to document where and why women fall out of the care continuum and then brought patients, community health promoters, and clinical stakeholders together in a co-design workshop grounded in community ownership. The result was three deliverables The Leo Project will carry forward: a refined Patient Journey Map, a Co-Design Workshop Report, and an Oncology Program Overview, a practical program design for staff training, stakeholder engagement, and program implementation as The Leo Project builds toward its cancer center launch.
“The most important evidence is often the kind that doesn’t appear in the literature. Go to the people who are already doing the work, watch how they do it, and let what you find there reshape what you thought you knew.”
I would like to thank Jess Danforth and the entire team at The Leo Project for their trust and generosity throughout this project. I am especially grateful to Paul, Edwin, Yvonne, Nancy, Anthony, and Njeri, whose stories and perspectives shaped everything we built.
Renny graduated with a Master of Public Health in Health and Social Behavior at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. With over a decade of experience in digital health entrepreneurship and AI-based medical device development in Japan, he pursued his MPH to bridge the gap between technology and equitable cancer care in underserved communities. Through his Rose Service Learning Fellowship with The Leo Project in Laikipia County, Kenya, he conducted landscape analysis, stakeholder interviews, co-designed community-based oncology programs, and developed a logic model to guide the organization’s service launch. He believes no one should face a diagnosis alone, and has dedicated his career to building health systems that reach people before they get lost.
This award recognizes a student team or individual whose project in public health practice contributes to the improvement of health of a defined population and makes a significant contribution to the public health practice knowledge base.
