These Grads are Filling Equity Gaps Through Entrepreneurship

Northeastern University graduate Cynthia Orforo is helping fill the gaps in community health care — one patient at a time. 

At Culture Care Collective, the health and human services technology company Orforo created while pursuing her doctorate at Northeastern, she and her team streamline the complicated health care process by providing people in local communities with easy access to health and social resources.   

The organization’s mission is rooted in health equity, Orforo recently shared at a forum held at the John D. O Bryant African-American Institute on the University’s Boston campus. It is a topic that has always been at the center of Orforo’s work. 

“It’s really the foundation of what we establish at Culture Care Collective — that everybody, despite how you look, how you live and your background, has an opportunity to get the services they need to be healthy and well,” she said.  

Orforo, who is a Double Husky and a Northeastern Women Who Empower award winner, was invited back to campus in honor of Women’s History Month for a table talk centered on entrepreneurship, wellness and student success.  

Joining her on stage was Northeastern graduate and fellow Women Who Empower Award winner Adebukola Ajao, who is the founder and chief marketing consultant a B.D.Y. Consult LLC, a Boston-based marketing agency catering to “small but impactful businesses.” 

Together, the pair shared their academic journeys at Northeastern, the importance of having a sense of belonging, and the ways they are using their skills and networks to make a positive impact in their communities. 

Orforo, who has a bachelor’s degree in nursing and a doctorate in nursing science, can trace the origins of her organization directly back to one class she had while pursuing her doctorate. 

“I got a 98% on a paper that looked a lot like Cultural Care Collective, and I wanted to build it right then and there,” she recalled.

Orforo decided to incorporate the idea into her dissertation, which centered on integrating community health care works in clinical settings.

For example, she spoke with people one-on-one in homeless encampments such as “Mass and Cass,” located in the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melena Cass Boulevard in Boston, Massachusetts, with a focus on “getting people to the services they need to be healthy and well,” she said.   

While at Northeastern pursuing her master’s degree in digital media management, Ajao created For All Things Digital, an online educational resource toolkit for businesses looking to up their digital presence and marketing skills.

The site features workshops, newsletters, and fundraising and grant opportunities. To date, the organization has helped raise more than $1.5 million in funding, and helped share more than 250 free grant opportunities just in 2025, according to Ajao’s online biography. 

“I was going around telling people how important it was to have a digital presence,” Ajao recalled at the time of the launch. 

A lot of people didn’t really understand the value of being more online, she said, until after the pandemic hit and forced everyone to up their digital skills. 

“I ended up helping a lot of businesses, students and school districts pivot to digital during the pandemic,” she said.

Another major area of focus for Ajao was spotlighting Black social movements in the media. 

“I created this concept called branding for Black liberation, and it really ties the intersection of digital media and the Black social movement,” she said. “I just don’t think media people of those times get enough recognition for the impactful work they did to even capture the moment for us to even know about it today.” 

Balancing her school work with her entrepreneurship ambitions certainly brought some level of stress, she said. 

One of the ways she dealt with it was through meditation. The John D. O Bryant African American Institute was also a great resource for Ajao, who was accepted into Northeastern through the MLK Fellowship, a graduate scholarship program managed by the institute. 

“Having the institute back me up was really important, knowing that I could talk to someone, that I had this North Star,” Ajao said. 

Today, in addition to running her own marketing firm, Ajao is an adjunct professor at Northeastern University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on digital media. 

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