On Friday, another senior from Brunswick (I think), Jessica, started working at Flashes. So I spent part of the morning showing her around the office and introducing her to everyone. Then, I started working on a project with Lisa, the head of marketing and special events. A large part of her job involves the design and production of Flashes of Hope brochures, pamphlets, newsletters, etc. When designing, Lisa has to make sure that she chooses photos that picture kids of different genders, ages, races, and appearances so that the promotional materials are not homogenous. So, Flashes created a database of over 500,000 photos from every photo shoot since the organization’s start in 2001. All Lisa has to do is search, for example, “caucasian, toddler, boy,” and all the photos of patients that meet those criteria are found. So today I spent a lot of time labeling some of the photos from previous photo shoots. The description of each patient consists of their age, their race, their appearance (such as whether or not the patient had hair, if they had any accessories on, whether they had any feeding tubes or IVs, etc.), who was in the picture with them (mom, dad, siblings, hospital staff, stuffed/real animal, etc.), and the name of the hospital where they were photographed.
In the afternoon, after I picked up lunch, I typed up a spreadsheet of the major donors to Flashes of Hope and their contact information for use when sending out invitations and letters for Flashes’s largest fundraising event, “Big Shots, Little Stars.” At the event last fall, the “Big Shots,” who are the largest donors, and the “Little Stars,” who are some of the photographed pediatric cancer patients, put on a fashion show to raise money. One of the Big Shots who, according to Allison, was the star of the fashion show, was Mr. Rayburn. I got to look through pictures of the fashion show and saw a couple shots of him strutting down the runway and posing in a ridiculous red jacket, which was really entertaining to see.
Also, there was a problem with a chapter director in DC that caused some chaos in the office. One of the families that was photographed at a shoot in DC a few months ago had tried to contact the chapter director to see if their photos could be rushed delivered because their son’s condition was worsening, so they wanted him to be able to see the pictures before he died. This request is very common so chapter directors are expected to make this their first priority and send the pictures overnight. However, neither the family, hospital nor local child life specialist could contact this chapter director. After a few weeks of emailing and calling the chapter director without any response, the child passed away without ever having the chance to see the pictures from that special day. Shocked by the irresponsible chapter director, the child life specialist finally decided to call the headquarters to see if anyone could find a way to get the family the photographs of their son in time for his funeral. When Hannah heard what had happened, she immediately made different calls to find an explanation for what had happened with the chapter director, and in fact found out that the director had the photos sitting in her office for nearly three weeks, but did simply forgot to mail the pictures. This was the first time that I had witnessed a problem within the organization so it was really interesting to see how the issue was dealt with an eventually resolved.
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