How She Did What a Country Couldn’t: Oana Gheorghiu’s Story

How She Did What a Country Couldn’t: Oana Gheorghiu’s Story
Oana Gheorghiu Courtesy to Bay Area Innovators
Steve Ispas
Steve Ispas
Reporter
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In this episode, we speak with Oana Gheorghiu, the cofounder of Give Life, a grassroots movement that led over 350,000 Romanians to help build the country’s first pediatric oncology hospital entirely through private donations.

What began as a fight for one child’s treatment turned into a national campaign—fueled by frustration with a broken health care system and a desire to prove that civil society could succeed where the state had failed.

From overcoming political roadblocks to constructing a 9-story, state-of-the-art public hospital, Oana shares how empathy, perseverance, and community turned an impossible dream into a symbol of hope for post-communist Romania.