The History Behind Changing Lives

Med Access International is a 25-year-old nonprofit that organizes medical humanitarian missions across Central and South America and the Caribbean.

Unlike most nonprofits, we have no paid staff. Our organization is entirely run by volunteers. Our volunteers also donate their time and talents and pay for their own mission travel expenses, which enables us to use nearly all of the donations we receive to purchase the medicines and supplies we use on each mission.

Our weeklong medical missions take place each summer and typically have 50 to 70 volunteers, although we have had as many as 130 volunteers on our biggest missions. We typically treat several thousand patients and perform over 100 surgeries on each mission, depending on the size of our mission team.

In recent years, we have also partnered with a high school robotics team at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Their students design and manufacture mechanical arms and hands for child amputees using 3D printers.

We were established in Rancho Mirage, California, as International Medical Alliance in 2000 but later changed our name to IMAHelps when we discovered other groups with the same name. We changed our name to Med Access International in early 2025 to more clearly reflect what we do, which is provide access to medical, dental, surgical, and prosthetic care to impoverished people of all ages throughout the Western Hemisphere. We’re hoping the name change strengthens our marketing, media, and donor outreach efforts as we launch new initiatives to build our nonprofit into a sustainable organization.

Our nonprofit was founded by Ines Allen and her husband, Tracey, in 2000 after Ines had spent nearly 20 years volunteering as a dental assistant and Spanish language interpreter for the Flying Samaritans, another nonprofit that organizes dental missions throughout Baja California, Mexico.

Ines was born and raised in Quito, Ecuador. But her family was poor and could not afford to take Ines’s older brother, Raul Gonzalez, to see a specialist when he developed heart problems as a young teenager. Raul died from heart problems at the age of 16, and his death traumatized Ines and her family so much that they immigrated to the United States when she was nine years old with the hope of escaping Ecuador’s poverty as well as the pain of Raul’s untimely death.

Ines and her siblings all pursued their U.S. citizenship, university degrees, and developed careers in their adult lives that brought them into American middle-class life. But Ines could never let go of the memories of growing up in poverty or the fact that poverty itself had prevented her family from providing Raul with medical care that could have saved his life.

Haunted by the pain and memories of growing up in Ecuadorian poverty, Ines came up with the idea of recruiting doctors, surgeons, dentists, and other medical specialists to conduct medical missions to some of the most impoverished locations in Ecuador and, ultimately, around the world. She initially recruited volunteers through her contacts with the Flying Samaritans, and her network grew by word of mouth. Ines and Tracey began to promote their medical mission work in the press and in the medical community.

Over the past quarter century, our volunteers have treated over 100,000 patients and provided life-changing surgeries for over 2,500 patients of all ages across the hemisphere, including Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. We also partner with other organizations to provide medical and dental services on medical missions in the United States.