Dream On With Debbie's Dream Foundation
When does a dream become a reality? Is it the moment you wake up, or when you make a positive impact on others? Sometimes, dreams emerge from life’s most difficult circumstances and become something greater than the individual who first imagined them.
That is what happened to Debbie Zelman. After being diagnosed with stomach cancer, Debbie refused to let the disease define her story. She founded Debbie’s Dream Foundation: Curing Stomach Cancer to connect everyone impacted by the disease from patients and caregivers to clinicians, researchers, and partners.
Although Debbie died on December 23, 2017 , her dream lives on through the foundation and her daughter, Rachel Guttman, Debbie Dream Foundation's Communications Committee Member. Rachel spoke with me about her mother’s legacy and how the foundation provides patient support, advances research, and builds greater awareness and education around stomach cancer.
1. What inspired Debbie to start the foundation?
My mom was diagnosed with stage IV stomach cancer in 2008. She was 40 years old, married, a practicing attorney with her own practice, and raising three young kids (my 3-year-old sister, my twin brother, and me). Doctors gave her weeks to live. She refused to accept that prognosis, she immediately closed down her law practice and threw herself into treatment: an aggressive chemo regimen, months in bed, in and out of hospitals. But even while she was fighting for her own life, she noticed something that made her frustrated, there was almost nothing out there for stomach cancer patients. There was no community, barely any research funding, and no real resources for families trying to make sense of a diagnosis like hers. This made her realize that there were others out there receiving the same diagnosis who also needed help. So in 2009, she decided to build the thing that didn't exist. That's how Debbie's Dream Foundation started; my mom refused to let other families feel as lost as she did.
2. How has the foundation evolved since its founding?
It started as one woman making calls from a hospital bed, sometimes with my grandma and a few of her close friends gathered around our kitchen table, or right next to her when she was too sick to get up. From those early conversations, it grew into a global organization with chapters across the U.S., Canada, and Germany, and a Scientific and Medical Advisory Board made up of some of the top researchers in the field.
On the research side, DDF has helped secure tens of millions of dollars in federal funding for stomach cancer, money that's gone toward real breakthroughs, including major clinical trials. The foundation also built out the Patient Resource Education Program (PREP), which pairs newly diagnosed patients and caregivers with mentors who've actually been through it.
My mom sadly passed away in December 2017 after battling the disease for ten years. Losing her was devastating for our family, but even in her final years she made sure the foundation had a strong team and a clear mission in place, so it would keep going without her. And it has. If anything, the team has pushed even harder since then to make sure her work outlives her and her legacy still lives on.
3. How does the foundation incorporate its mission and vision into its ethos?
Everything DDF does traces back to the same three pillars my mom built the organization around: awareness, research, and support. Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill puts patients and caregivers directly in front of lawmakers to push for research funding. PREP pairs people with mentors who walk them through the diagnosis and treatment decisions, so they're not figuring it out alone. And things like the youth art contest, which they've held a few times, get a younger generation engaging with a disease most people have never even heard of. It all comes back to its mission.
4. What are ways people can get involved?
There's a role for almost anyone to get involved. People can donate directly to fund research and patient programs, or start their own peer-to-peer fundraiser. Patients, survivors, and caregivers can join PREP as mentors or mentees. Anyone can attend or support Advocacy Day in D.C. each February, where volunteers meet with lawmakers to push for research funding. There are also local chapters people can get involved with in their own city, and simpler ways in, such as sharing DDF's educational content or just talking about stomach cancer to help chip away at how under-the-radar it still is.
5. What is the future of the foundation?
The honest answer is: finish what she started. Stomach cancer is still underfunded and under-discussed relative to how deadly it is and how prevalent it is becoming, so the work isn't close to done. I'd love to see DDF keep expanding its research funding, push for earlier detection tools like H. pylori screening, and keep growing PREP so no patient goes through this without support.
On a more personal level, I want to make sure my mom's name, legacy, and her story stay attached to that mission, actively pushing this cause forward. I’ve tried to do my part; I started DDF chapters at the University of Florida when I was an undergraduate student and at the University of Miami when I was a masters student, to get my peers involved on campus. I designed and sold t-shirts, stickers, and pop sockets, and held fundraising events with both local and bigger businesses, including Chipotle, to raise money and awareness. I'm hoping to do more of that kind of work in the near future.
Going forward, I'd also love to help expand DDF's reach online, getting her story and the foundation's work in front of people who haven't heard of stomach cancer or the foundation. That could mean reaching someone looking to help, or a family who needs the support themselves, and making it easier for people to find their way in.
