As the area HOSA competitive event winners were revealed on the screen at Parker University, the community awareness team screamed seeing their name next to the third placement. Although advancing felt amazing, their goal wasn’t just that, but instead they wanted to actually make an impact in their community.

When competition season for HOSA came around, juniors Saanvi Yepuru, Sahasra Rudraraju and Dhanvi Kodali knew they wanted to compete in an event that would allow them to connect with the community. This led them to their campaign “Flutter for Lupus.”

“We knew we wanted to focus on a disease, and specifically one that’s often misdiagnosed, because I think those are the ones people often don’t know the severe effects of,” Rudraraju said. “With lupus, it’s one of those things that everyone’s heard of, but they don’t actually know what it is like.”

Lupus is an autoimmune disease that mistakenly attacks the body’s own tissues and organs. This causes widespread inflammation as well as damage to the skin, joints, heart, kidneys, lungs and brain. There are many different types of lupus and the team encountered patients with different symptoms along their campaign.

“We talked to one person, his name was Troy Conquest, and he actually became paralyzed, not solely because of lupus, there were other factors that led to it,” Rudraraju said. “But this kind of worsened that condition due to the type of lupus he had.”

In order to fulfill their requirements for their event and truly impact their community, the team hosted many different events and activities. From starting out with a social media platform, they quickly grew to hosting podcasts and pop-up events, their full-day event being ‘Flutter Fest.’

“This was basically a full day of games and learning more about what lupus was,” Yepuru said. “We had a meditation session in the morning, and then we had a lady from the Texas chapter of Lupus Foundation of America come in. She talked about lupus and taught everyone what it actually was. Then we had a raffle ticket as well as trivia games and bead making.”

Though the event went successfully, there were some struggles leading up to it.

“The biggest thing was a venue,” Rudraraju said. “I would say that was the biggest issue for any event. Because anything we wanted to organize, we needed a venue for it, but they would often cost a couple thousand dollars we didn’t have. Or there would be too many restrictions around getting a venue there.”

The team was able to persevere through these issues and find other solutions, however, there were some obstacles that they couldn’t control.

“That day, it turned out to be way too cold,” Kodali said. “So we had to figure out how to cut down what we wanted to do and make everything fit in a smaller space. And that was a pretty last minute thing and was definitely difficult as well.”

Despite these struggles, the team knew it was worth it when the people from their community congratulated them for their efforts through many different platforms.

“We even had a couple people comment on our Instagram about our podcast,” Yepuru said. “All those comments were like, ‘Keep it up, girls. These stories are truly inspiring.’”

But the most meaningful comment came through an Instagram DM from someone diagnosed with lupus.

“She told us how she was recently diagnosed with lupus herself and how our podcast gave her so much inspiration and it just made her feel so heard,” Rudraraju said. “ I think the engagement we got with comments on our posts and everyone was so encouraging and just felt totally grateful for our campaign.”

The team was also invited to the Young Tech Pioneers event in Frisco which allowed them to be featured on Frisco News Media’s instagram and were able to further educate others and broaden their audience.

“That was a really big help for us to reach out to a community beyond Prosper and even go into Frisco and the surrounding areas,” Kodali said. “I think that was definitely a big thing from the community that we wouldn’t have gotten that opportunity if we weren’t invited to go to the expo.”

Their podcast ‘Flutter Forward’ was also a big part of their campaign and allowed them to reach and learn from many different people.

“We had lupus patients talk about their experiences and how much their diagnosis influenced their daily lives,” Kodali said. “We got to interact with patients and let them voice their own stories and talk beyond what lupus is in theory, but how it actually looks like in a real setting.”

This outreach not only allowed the team to share awareness to the community, but, along the way, they learned more about the disorder than they could have through research.

“We talked to a woman who was diagnosed with lupus at one of our pop up events,” Yepuru said. “She basically talked about how every day she would wake up, and her entire body would hurt so much that she couldn’t get out of bed, she couldn’t walk or talk.”

After advancing to the State Leadership Conference, the team had to condense all 14 of their events into a simple five minute presentation, which proved to be difficult.

“We dedicated about 2.5 minutes to just talking about lupus, medications, treatments, diagnosis, diagnostic procedures,” Yepuru said. “So we wanted to really make sure that the judges understood what exactly lupus was.”

Though they did not advance past state, the team is grateful for the people they have met and the impact they have been able to make. They have spent a substantial amount of time and dedicated a lot of thought to their events and campaign. 

“One thing about our campaign is we chose ‘Flutter for Lupus’ because a butterfly is the symbol of someone struggling with lupus because of the butterfly shape rashes they get on their face,” Rudraraju said. “We wanted to create a butterfly origami mural at school. So I think that’s something we want to do in the future.”

This campaign is not something that ends with their competitive journey in HOSA, but instead is something that they hope to continue and grow.

“I think at the end of the day, regardless of how big the impact is, just getting out there and interacting with the community in any way is better than nothing,” Kodali said. “So just being willing to take up any opportunity that comes by or being able to organize anything in the future ourselves, is definitely something that we would be doing.”