Welcome to the 2017 Team PHenomenal Hope Website
Welcome to our new website!
As a co-founder of Team PHenomenal Hope, I am proud to welcome you to our new Team PHenomenal Hope site.
This version website has been a long time in the making, and we proudly launch it today. How long, you ask? Well, we were founded in 2012, so that would be just over 4 years! Although if you’ve been following us over the years you will have seen changes as we develop and grow. This is the next evolution, the most accurate reflection of where we are and who we are today. We started work on it about six month ago.
The evolution of our website reflects the evolution of our organization. We started our first 2 years as an organization supporting a team of four women in the race of our lives, the Race Across America. We, along with the Pulmonary Hypertension Association, raised over $140,000 in a joint effort to raise funds for patient services and research, through the efforts of our team and PH patients all over the country.
From that journey, we learned that our team was much larger than the racers and crew, because we literally raced with members of the PH community from around the world. In 2015 we expanded our team, welcoming new athletes to join us in our race against PH, in an effort to put our colors out there, promote our athletes as they raced for us and in so doing, raised awareness about pulmonary hypertension.
My hope is that people will clearly see that Team PH is about supporting the PH community
2016 marked a significant turning point for us. Our friendships among team members and PH community friends (“PHriends”) had grown, and our race became more personal than ever, leading to the launch of our first national campaign called Let Me Be Your Lungs (#LetMeBeYourLungs – share it in your feed!).
In this campaign, racers partnered with patients to race in endurance events in honor or in memory of them. We realized that for many patients with pulmonary hypertension, running a marathon or racing in a 24-hour race would be beyond the pale. We also realized the importance of racing as a team: athletes using their race to amplify patient stories, and our PHriends motivating our athletes to dig deep and cross that finish line, knowing they were racing for so much more than themselves.
Also in 2016, we went to the PHA International Conference, and met hundreds of wonderful members of the community from all over the world, inspiring us to make it a part of our mission to amplify their stories, not only to raise awareness among people who do not know about pulmonary hypertension, but more importantly so that patients around the world know they are not alone, that there are others in this race with them, and that we, as athletes and friends, take their stories to heart and stand alongside them.
Today, our website reflects this new place where we all are – together – in the PH race. You’ll see that Team PHenomenal Hope is not about athletes racing races. We still race – but it is just a part of what we do, and we do that in service of the PH community and PH awareness. My hope is that people will clearly see that Team PH is about supporting the PH community through the creative use of endurance sports to make connections and strive together toward a greater good.
Finally, I would like to thank our web team for their hard work in rebuilding this site: Sarah and Steve Bon, Steve Rivenbark from Bon’s Eye Marketing for their consulting and incredible design contributions, Phil Webster for his unparalleled WordPress development & design implementation skills, and most of all, our Executive Director, Chris Field, who brought his vision from and idea to reality in the leadership of this project.
So with that, I invite you to take a look at our new website. It will continue to evolve, and we continue to bring you new content – patients’ stories, news about our athletes and races around the world, and our #LetMeBeYourLungs Campaign. Please read, enjoy, and contribute! We invite feedback and submissions! If you have a story to share, please submit it.
Related Press Release: Team PHenomenal Hope Launches New Website