Rachel Firestone

Rachel is an experienced product owner, team lead, and strategist who leads participatory design and operational rollouts for digital and AI interventions in health and emergencies. She has spent over 15 years building technology and community empowerment initiatives in low-resourced settings at the intersection between justice, sustainability, and human rights. Across projects, she brings the tenets of open-source software and digital public goods (DPGs), community networks and peer learning, and critical storytelling to affect systems-level change.  

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Decolonization and the history of competing social movements ground Rachel’s world view and commitment to community agency. Rachel first explored using mobile phones as tools for change with civil society groups in India, through initiatives empowering youth with trafficking and displacement backgrounds and women elected to local government. She later joined the World Bank’s Digital Development practice to work on last-mile connectivity and digital payments in conflict zones, where she also co-created business models and financing plans with tech hubs and digital incubators. Rachel then joined Hala Systems, a start-up and then social enterprise using emerging tech to design civilian early warning systems and investigative documentation tools in conflict and emergencies. She grew the company from a team of 12 to 70 and expanded Hala’s product offerings and field deployments across Syria and Yemen and through pilot instances in Mali and Sudan. Coming to digital health in 2023, Rachel’s health efforts include health system digitalization and data integration with ministries of health and last-mile health facilities, product features and sustainability strategy with health DPG stewards, and the development of shared, cross-border machine learning models for climate-affected disease forecasting.  

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Rachel came to Sonder to combine forces with collaborators committed to co-creation and listening from the start. She believes that the restructuring (of who has voice, ownership, and decision-making authority) necessary to decolonize global health and foreign assistance must happen through design as well as politics.

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She holds a master's degree in international affairs from Georgetown University and studied history and south Asian studies as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University in the United States.

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When not at her desk, Rachel is probably running, climbing, or hanging with her two kids and partner on a playground somewhere in Berlin.