William Hornby

William Hornby is at the forefront of raising awareness for men with eating disorders with his advocacy on social media. He speaks publicly on advocacy, mental health, and eating disorder recovery. He travels around the world both in person and virtually giving workshops and presentations on “The Power of Becoming the Advocate You Needed”. He is the recipient of the William Donald Schaefer Helping People Award for 2021 and he sits on the youth advisory board for the Eating Disorder Coalition. He has collaborated with the National Alliance for Eating Disorders and The National Eating Disorder Association.

William Hornby's The Power of Becoming the Advocate You Needed is a powerful presentation detailing his own journey in advocacy in the eating disorder recovery space, the topics and identities he identified that were missing from that space, and his own approach to those topics. He started this work himself because he could not find any men advocating for eating disorder recovery when he was dealing with the worst of his own eating disorder. He advocates for people to become more discerning and aware of the ways in which they are not represented but need to be. He talks candidly about issues that he has faced and concretely offers ways for students to become more proactive in an increasingly social-media-driven culture that weighs heavily on them. His presentation and talk are refreshingly honest, timely, relatable to students, and helpful as we teach others to become the advocate they themselves need. His social media prowess and depth of knowledge about the topics of eating disorders, intersectional representation, anti-fatness, and healthism make this a unique presentation unlike anything else on the speaker circuit today.

Learning Objectives:

1. Gain a deeper understanding of the ways diet culture, anti-fatness, healthism, and morality influence the development of eating disorders.
2. Understand the importance of intersectional representation in advocacy and in all walks of life.
3. Examine the responsibilities that come with having a platform and influence.
4. Feel inspired to become the advocate they once needed and/or feel compelled to support the work of other people who have done so.

In William Hornby's speech Eating Disorder and Identity: Gender, Sexuality, and Size he and his audience explore the impacts gender, sexuality, and body size have on eating disorder development through social, systemic, and medical lenses. A person's gender, sexuality, and body have tremendous impacts on the ways they are socialized and treated systemically, and environmental factors such as those have a significant impact on eating disorder development.

Learning Objectives:

1. Gain a deeper understanding of the nuances of social, systemic, and medical identity-based environmental factors.
2. Examine the role morality plays in eating disorder development.
3. Learn how to combat the development of eating disorders due to these social and systemic factors.
4. Learn how to identify identity-based discrimination and harmful habits within themselves and others.

William Hornby works with multiple eating disorder recovery organizations both for-profit and nonprofit. In this speech, he discusses his career in for-profit and nonprofit social media advocacy, how he developed and networked his way into his career, and his tips for how to go about working in social media and content creation for organizations. He is the Creative Director of VERY (Virtual Eating Recovery for You), a for-profit online eating disorder recovery outpatient organization that provides patients with remote access to a psychiatrist-led team that includes a registered dietitian and a therapist. He also works regularly on social media content creation and strategy with for-profit company Within Health and nonprofit companies the Eating Disorders Coalition, Project HEAL, and The National Alliance for Eating Disorders.

Learning Objectives:

1. Learn about the value of networking through William's own testimonial.
2. Explore the way social media algorithms work.
3. Understand the dos and don'ts of content creation for an organization.
4. Learn how to build your career leveraging your content creation and social media strategy.