Rebecca Onie

Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Health Leads

In 1996, during her sophomore year at Harvard College, Rebecca Onie co-founded Health Leads (formerly Project HEALTH) with Dr. Barry Zuckerman, Chair of Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center.

Rebecca served as Executive Director of Health Leads for three years, overseeing the organization’s growth to Providence and New York City. After attending Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review and research assistant for Professors Laurence Tribe and Lani Guinier, Rebecca clerked for the Honorable Diane P. Wood of the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She then served as an associate at Miner, Barnhill & Galland P.C., a boutique law firm in Chicago, where she represented civil rights and employment discrimination plaintiffs, health centers, affordable housing developers, and nonprofit organizations. During this time, Rebecca served as founding Co-Chair of Health Leads' Board of Directors.

Rebecca returned to Health Leads as Chief Executive Officer in February 2006, leading the organization’s expansion to new sites in Baltimore and Chicago and increasing the number of families served by 89% in two years. Last year, Health Leads trained and mobilized a corps of 660 college volunteers serving nearly 6,000 low-income patients and their families in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, New York, Providence, and Washington, D.C.

In 2009, she was honored to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, for “individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” Most recently, O! Magazine named her to its 2010 Power List of twenty women who are "changing the world for the better."

Rebecca is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a U.S. Ashoka Fellow. She received the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award in 2009, honoring Americans under the age of 40 whose commitment to service is changing their communities and the country; the Jane Rainie Opel '50 Young Alumna Award in 2008, for outstanding contributions to the advancement of women; and the Do Something Brick Award for Community Leadership in 1999, for dynamic young people under the age of thirty with the passion and drive to improve their communities.