New MBA Graduate Launches Nonprofit

It is an understatement to say Sean Tucker is busy. He is graduating this May with a Helzberg MBA with healthcare leadership concentration. He has been taking evening courses, working the night shift at the University of Kansas Hospital and, just seven months ago, he started a nonprofit called Laboratories Without Borders. To top it off, he and his wife have two young children at home.

Amongst all those activities, Laboratories Without Borders has really taken off. It started when Tucker, who has a degree in clinical laboratory science from the University of Kansas, met Carla Orner of Heart to Heart international. Orner was encouraging laboratorians to do service work.

The idea stuck with Tucker. As an undergraduate, he went on three alternative spring break trips, was a soup kitchen manager and tutored children after school. So the idea of doing service was natural to him.

But Tucker didn’t just get the urge to volunteer. He got the idea for a business that would fill a void. After researching relief organizations, he discovered that no one – not the World Health Organization, the CDC or Medecins Sans Frontieres – had any operations specifically dedicated to humanitarian laboratory care.

So he founded Laboratories Without Borders. It has several goals. First, it is creating disaster relief backpacks. These are stocked with all of the materials a laboratorian would need to run crucial diagnostic tests and live in a devastated area for up to a week. The tests are specialized to the type of disaster and include a mechanism for dealing with biohazard waste. These backpacks have been developed with help from Vanderbilt University.

Also, the organization wants to serve community laboratories by providing volunteer training and resource support.

Lastly, it is looking to establish international laboratories in underserved clinics, mostly in developing countries.

Heart to Heart International has helped Laboratories Without Borders negotiate partnerships with major medical suppliers to provide the lab equipment. Over the course of that relationship, Heart to Heart decided that Laboratories Without Borders is providing services that they should offer. So they plan to incorporate Tucker and his nonprofit into their organizational structure.

As a result, the scope has broadened to include generating awareness of service opportunities among laboratorians and encouraging upper-level managers to allow employees time off for service. Tucker and Orner want to reform National Laboratory Week to help them meet those goals.

“We want to have laboratorians get out in their communities and make a difference,” Tucker said. “It has the reputation of a reclusive profession, and we’re really trying to change that.”

Although Tucker has turned in his business plan for Laboratories Without Borders – his final MBA assignment – his work is obviously just beginning. And he credits the MBA program at Rockhurst for helping him be so successful.

“The Jesuit tradition played a really integral role in how successful I was in forming this nonprofit,” he said. “The leadership skills I learned really increased my confidence.”