FERI-TB's model bridges what the clinical system does well — diagnosis, medication, monitoring — with what it often can't do alone: navigate patients through the housing, transportation, employment, and cultural barriers that determine whether a nine-month treatment course actually gets completed.
We translate surveillance data — CDC national trends, state-level incidence, and community-level burden — into concrete, targeted community action. Programs are built around where the burden is and who is most likely to be lost from care, not around organizational convenience.
Trained patient navigators work one-on-one with individuals identified as high-risk for treatment interruption — unstably housed patients, immigrant and refugee populations, low-income workers. Navigators coordinate appointments, medication support, benefits enrollment, transportation, and housing referrals across the full arc of a 6-to-9-month treatment course.
TB education is built with — not for — the communities we serve. Materials, workshops, and community sessions are developed in the languages and cultural contexts of the populations at highest risk, reducing stigma and improving both initial engagement and long-term adherence.
TB care sits at the intersection of medicine and social work. Our model links patients across systems that don't naturally communicate — hospitals, local health departments, housing services, community-based organizations — so patients don't fall through the gaps between them.
FERI-TB is designed as a collaborator, not a competitor. We work alongside health departments, hospital systems, community-based organizations, and other nonprofits — bringing patient navigation capacity to a system that consistently reports needing more of it.
FERI-TB is headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, and focused on the communities in Virginia and Maryland where TB burden and structural risk factors most consistently overlap. Our model is built to be adaptable to other counties and states as the need grows.
Virginia continues to see meaningful TB burden concentrated in specific health districts, and structural risk factors — housing instability, language access needs, transportation gaps — are consistently present across both urban and rural counties.
Maryland's urban centers face a distinct configuration of TB risk, with high proportions of non-U.S.-born patients and specific structural barriers in housing and transit access. FERI-TB's Maryland presence is designed to build on that context.
Every program FERI-TB runs is evaluated against the outcomes that matter: treatment completion rates among enrolled patients, engagement rates within high-risk populations, and referral partnership growth with health departments and hospital systems.
Our founder's doctoral research on TB adherence provides both the intellectual foundation and the evaluation framework — meaning our programs are informed by the science and accountable to it.
Health departments, hospital systems, and community-based organizations — we build formal referral relationships. Funders and donors — every contribution goes directly toward the patient navigation and education programs described on this page.
