From the beginning of May through the end of July, I had the pleasure of interning with Heartfelt Dreams Foundation, a charity founded by St. Lawrence alumnus Eric Ankerud ’78. The foundation is centered around improving the treatment experience for congenital heart defect (CHD) patients and their families through emotional, educational, and financial support, while also advancing CHD awareness within the medical community. Joining this mission gave me the opportunity to build on skills I started developing during my previous internship with a women’s healthcare organization in Zanzibar, Tanzania, where much of my work focused on community outreach and event coordination. I already knew I was interested in the type of work where business and public health overlap, so I was excited to apply those skills in a completely different healthcare setting and learn more about how a small nonprofit is successful.
My largest project was helping with the 2026 golf fundraising event. I worked on the silent auction and reached out to local businesses and communities to help increase attendance and involvement in the event. That experience gave me a much better understanding of fundraising as something built through relationships, not just asking people for money. Outside of the golf tournament, I helped spread CHD awareness through book promotion, led the review process for more than 130 nursing scholarship applications, and created resources to help families navigate challenges surrounding CHD, including a guide for using GoFundMe. One of my favorite parts of the internship, and also one of the hardest, was creating patient stories. I took the experiences families shared with the foundation and turned them into one-page stories that were accurate and respectful while still communicating the emotion behind what families are going through. I felt a responsibility to represent each family honestly. Through those stories, I began to understand CHD differently. It is not a medical problem that ends after one surgery; many people are born into years of appointments, procedures, uncertainty, and changes in their condition as they grow. That reality can place an enormous emotional and financial burden on an entire family. At the same time, these stories were never about pity. Heartfelt Dreams calls the people behind them “Heartfelt Dreams Heroes” for a reason. What stood out to me most was their resilience and the ability of families to keep moving forward through circumstances that are difficult to imagine from the outside.
I am extremely grateful for what I learned during this internship and for the skills I will take into my senior year and eventually my career. Eric taught me a lot about the business side of running a nonprofit, particularly how important it is to build genuine relationships, maintain a strong network, and give people a reason to care about the mission behind the organization. More importantly, Heartfelt Dreams changed the way I think about healthcare itself. Supporting someone cannot stop at treating what is physically wrong or giving them financial assistance. It also means listening to their story, understanding what they and their family are carrying, and figuring out what kind of support would actually make their lives easier. As someone interested in both business and public health, that is a lesson I want to carry into whatever I do next.