Meet Andrea Eidelman

We recently connected with Andrea Eidelman and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Andrea, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I have worked in the nonprofit sector since approximately 2005. There are many challenges in the nonprofit sector because resources are always limited, and the population’s needs are usually extreme. The work is demanding and requires you to give a lot of yourself. Working in this sector has given me all the resilience needed to tackle the significant challenges nonprofits tend to solve.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I am the CEO of Debbie’s Dream Foundation: Curing Stomach Cancer. DDF is a nonprofit organization that Debbie Zelman founded in 2009. At that time, Debbie was a practicing attorney, wife, and mother of three small children when she was diagnosed with stage IV incurable stomach cancer. Upon diagnosis, she was given only six months to live. Debbie took what would have devastated the average family and made it her mission to help others by starting this foundation. Our mission is to raise awareness about stomach cancer, fund stomach cancer research, support and educate patients and families, and ultimately help find a cure. Our advocacy work has not only helped inform people about gastric cancer, but it has continued to help increase the annual federal budget for gastric cancer research. In addition, we’ve directly funded $1.45 million in research with the hope that we’re moving closer to discovering a cure. Unfortunately, Debbie passed away in 2017, but her legacy lives on through DDF. Since then, our mission has shifted to be more patient-focused as we’ve grown our understanding and now cater more to the needs of our patient community. More recently, we launched our Health Equity program to help address the healthcare disparities that affect minority populations. Gastric cancer is disproportionately represented in Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, and Asian populations. So our goal is to close the gap by educating our community on the statistics and joining forces with other community organizations to provide resources that help create a more balanced healthcare system.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Through all the challenges we faced when our founder passed away, and we had to pivot our mission work, we always focused on our patients and caregivers and how we could best serve their needs. I would say the skills I have implemented are to stay focused on the mission, not lose sight of the goals you are trying to achieve and accomplish and take time for yourself because we are also caregivers in many ways to the communities we serve. The work is demanding, so taking care of your needs is important to serve others better.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?
Debbie’s Dream Foundation is always looking for community partners and collaborators. We realize that this is the key to the success and expansion of our programs. Working with community groups allows us to utilize other resources and tap into different skills we may not have in-house. For example, we partner with experts from some of the top hospitals and research institutions across the country to highlight the research on gastric cancer through our year-round educational webinars and symposia. We teamed up with CancerCare and their amazing licensed oncology social workers to provide the first-ever hotline for stomach cancer resources. In addition, we partnered with The United Way of Broward County and the YMCA of South Florida for our Health Equity Workshops to educate minority populations about healthcare disparities related to stomach cancer. Finally, we joined forces with Memorial Healthcare psychologists for our Monthly Virtual Stomach Cancer Support Groups to address the mental and emotional needs of the stomach cancer community. These partnerships, as well as collaborating with others in positions of prominence or influence, are critical to our expansion and reach, and we always welcome them with open arms.

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