Built three platforms in two weeks and secured $100K sponsor

Achievements

Hunger Action Heroes Unite! (HAHU) is a comic book and national-standards-aligned curriculum that teaches kids in grades 4 to 9 about hunger, food waste, empathy, and the power of taking action. It's a social enterprise of Feeding San Diego, a partner food bank of Feeding America: sales help fund critical hunger-relief and food rescue programs.

Year 1 was a real struggle. Against a $175K foundation grant, HAHU reached only 4% of its student goal and 2% of its revenue goal. Schools loved the curriculum but couldn't afford it, and there was no communication loop, making it challenging to get impact feedback. Further, as a non-profit, I didn't have much of a marketing budget so getting the word out about the curriculum to schools across the country was difficult.

Using Claude, learned through Mindvalley's AI Mastery program, I designed and built three new platforms in a matter of two weeks:

- The HAHU National Challenge, a 50-state contest for kids in grades 4 to 9

- HAHU Quest, a gamified classroom experience with badges, a live national leaderboard, and a mechanic that lets partner organizations embed their own program as a bonus challenge, and

- A sponsorship management platform where donors can gift the curriculum directly to classrooms that can't afford it.

I also used Claude to design a brand book and to stand up a 32-agent AI team across 7 departments, the closest thing HAHU has to staff, so one person could run sales, marketing, product, and operations at once. I am still refining my team, but they have already made such a huge difference. Claude has also been behind the presentations, content calendars, and research that has been mind-blowing.

Creating those platforms changed everything for me. Since building them, I was able to secure Stoke Tracks as a $100K presenting sponsor for the Hunger Action Heroes Unite! National Challenge, signed four Founding Coalition Partners (World Wildlife Fund's Food Waste Warriors, ReFED, Let's Go Compost, and Lunch Out of Landfills), and Feeding America, the largest hunger relief organization in the country, is coming on board as a Founding Coalition Partner, pending final approval from its national advisory council, with plans to promote HAHU and the National Challenge across its network of 200 food banks starting September 1, 2026.

The National Challenge will be announced nationally on September 1, 2026, running through March 12, 2027. Winners in each of two divisions receive a trip to Comic-Con 2027 for them and a guardian, a $750 college scholarship, a $3,000 impact grant for their school, and $1,000 to donate to a hunger-relief or food rescue organization of their choice. With Feeding America and our other Coalition Partners networks behind it, it has the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of students across the country, and the excitement it's building, along with the coalition, is already driving new awareness for the HAHU comic book and curriculum at the center of it all.

Tools

Claude (Projects and Claude Design), used through the PRD, Design, and Build skills to move from concept to working product and to architect the AI team. GitHub, to carry the platform designs from prototype into production.

Methodology

Every platform started as a structured PRD, not a mockup: defining the problem, and the kid-safety, brand, and revenue guardrails, before any design work began. From there, I used Claude Design to build three functional, clickable prototypes instead of slides: the National Challenge landing page, the Classroom Impact Dashboard (badges, leaderboard, real-world impact tracking), and a Sponsorship Management platform where donors fund classrooms directly.

I took those prototypes straight into partner meetings. Showing WWF, ReFED, Let's Go Compost, and Lunch Out of Landfills exactly how their program would appear as a bonus challenge on a real leaderboard, not a concept slide, is what turned interest into signed commitments, and it's the same platform now sitting in front of Feeding America's CEO. From there, the designs moved from prototype to production: I pushed them to GitHub, and HAHU's website agency is now building out the backend.

I used the same approach to build my AI team: a Director-first build sequence, RTEC system prompts, and a shared knowledge-file protocol so that every agent works from the same HAHU context. I also used Claude to rewrite HAHU's Teacher's Guide and Student Handbook, and it caught significant errors that would otherwise have gone to print.

Learnings

A working prototype closes partnerships faster than a pitch deck ever could. Impact compounds through partners: the same coalition mechanic that won over five nonprofits is the same one that brought the largest hunger relief organization in the country, with 200 food banks and roughly 6 billion meals distributed a year, to the table to put its full network behind HAHU.

As a one-woman operation, every build has to count, and there's no hiring my way out of a slow year. AI-assisted structure, first through vibe-coded products, then through an AI team built the same way, is what turned things around in a matter of months, and I'm just getting started!

One of the most personal outcomes wasn't a platform or a partnership. At Noelle Russell's recommendation, I used Claude to help me build a personal constitution, DANA SPARKLE, mapping out who I am and what I give to the world. Next to a $100K sponsorship, it sounds small, but it's helped give me clarity. I'm getting it tattooed on my arm!

Relevant URLs

HAHU National Challenge landing page

HAHU Quest Classroom Impact Dashboard

HAHU Sponsorship Management platform

hungeractionheroes.org

HAHU Brand Book