Arlene Samen, APRN
Arlene began her career in Utah as a nurse practitioner at age 27,
specializing in maternal and fetal medicine. In 1997, His
Holiness the Dalai Lama asked Arlene to save the lives of
mothers and their newborns in Tibet, where one in ten newborns
were dying of preventable causes.
In 2004, she left her clinical practice to found One Heart
Worldwide (OHW). While working in Tibet, Arlene developed
the “Network of Safety” model, which brings life-saving care to
expectant mothers and infants where the need is the greatest. In
2009, OHW extended the model to remote villages in Nepal and
the Copper Canyon of Mexico. OHW has now arranged to
construct and operate nearly 500 birthing centers in Nepal alone.
Over the course of her work, Arlene has endured political
uprisings, earthquakes, and the SARS epidemic in order to
provide women safe, clean deliveries, touching the lives of
hundreds of thousands of women to date.
Arlene has received many awards for her efforts; most recently
she received the Global Thinkers Forum 2016 Award for
Excellence in Women’s Empowerment. Arlene and her team are
hard at work to bring OHW to scale in Nepal and globally. In
2020, OHW was selected as one of six global organizations for a
case study by the Gates Foundation on the Network of Safety
model.
