#HCWvsHunger is short for Healthcare Workers versus Hunger. It is the social media hashtag for a yearly friendly competition between health care workers and friends that started in December 2020 to help relieve food insecurity during the pandemic. The competition is meant to spur healthy competition between teams with a goal of maximizing contributions to food banks and other organizations fighting hunger. You choose where to donate, and none of the money goes to or through us, so that you retain complete control over your donation.
World hunger has increased substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic after years of steady decline. Action Against Hunger estimates that 811 million people worldwide currently suffer from hunger and severe malnutrition, 14 million of those people being children under the age of five. Our mission is to help alleviate food insecurity and assist those struggling with hunger during the pandemic. YOU can be a part of the change.
Dr. Weyand is a pediatric hematologist oncologist at the University of Michigan Mott Children’s Hospital. Clinically, she is particularly interested in young women and girls with bleeding or clotting disorders and is the co-director of a combined hematology/gynecology program serving this population. She started the HCWvsHunger friendly competition in 2020, and continues to work with Dr. Prowell and others to make it an annual success. She tweets as @acweyand
Dr. Prowell is Associate Professor of Oncology in the Johns Hopkins Breast Cancer Program. Her areas of clinical and research interest include: development of novel agents for breast cancer, neoadjuvant therapy, and the unique challenges of breast cancer in younger women. She partnered with Dr. Weyand early in our inaugural campaign. She is excited once again to help combat hunger and bring joy and meaning to other healthcare workers during the pandemic. She tweets as @tmprowell.
Gavin is our Chief Integration Officer. During the 2021 competition, he wrote code for the website and the automatic updating system for our donation Google Form. Gavin is a freshman in college, majoring in Computer Science.
Isla is our Chief Marketing Officer. During the 2021 competition, she managed our Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok accounts (all @hcwvshunger), manually verified donations, and updated our website’s content. Isla is a senior in high school.
Simran is our Chief Technology Officer. During the 2021 competition, she designed our website, helped create code to translate donation data to our leaderboard, and manually verified thousands of donations. Simran is a junior in high school.
Sameer is our Chief Data Officer. During the 2021 competition, he designed our spreadsheet for data organization and automatic recording of donations, and created code to translate data to our leaderboard. Sameer is a freshman in high school.
River joined the HCWvsHunger team in 2022 as our Secretary. He is in charge of preparing agendas for team meetings, recording meeting minutes, and identifying action items for our future meetings. River is a freshman in high school.
