Anyone who’s ever been affected by breast cancer knows that the impact of cancer lasts long after active treatment ends. A cancer diagnosis and the treatments that follow can have long term effects on the patient’s physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing and can have a lasting impact on the survivor’s family too.
This is why the Women’s Breast Health Fund exists.
The Women’s Breast Health Fund (WBHF), a permanent endowment of the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, was established in 2009 by a group of anonymous donors. Serving Blount, Jefferson, Shelby, St. Clair, and Walker counties, the fund is readily available to provide grants to nonprofits in the Greater Birmingham area. An eleven-member advisory committee oversees the grant making process to support programs and initiatives that serve breast cancer survivors and their families from the time of diagnosis and throughout each subsequent stage of life. The fund also strives to empower healthcare professionals to offer survivors the best continuum of care.
“This was the niche that the Women’s Breast Health Fund was going to serve,” says program director Kim Rogers, reflecting on the fund’s origins. “Not to do research, not to do actual medical treatment, because that was being done really well.”
But the donors and committee behind the Women’s Breast Health Fund knew that patients needed more.
As the WBHF marks its 15th anniversary, the fund remains dedicated to making life better for women who are facing breast cancer, their loved ones and the healthcare professionals who care for them.
WBHF History
Madeline Harris, the first program director for the Women’s Breast Health Fund, stresses that the fund’s original committee was committed to addressing issues that mattered most to breast cancer survivors. Through surveys, interviews, and focus groups, the committee assessed breast cancer survivors throughout the Greater Birmingham area.
“To create our guidelines, we really didn’t want to just use what we thought was missing, but what the community said was missing,” Harris said.
The community assessments found that while most breast cancer patients had access to top-notch medical care, many weren’t getting the support services they needed.
“We had great surgeons, great oncologists, great people in radiation,” Rogers says. “But what survivors and their loved ones were telling us was, yeah, the care is great, but what happens after the care or during the care when we have needs that are not necessarily medical, but are a result of the diagnosis?”
One of the first things the WBHF helped support was a breast cancer patient navigation program at Princeton Baptist Medical Center. Through navigation programs, patients are matched with a health care professional to guide them through every step of their breast cancer journey.
Through the years, the WBHF has helped to support a wide range of initiatives. For example, the fund has supported a camp for adolescent boys whose families have been affected by breast cancer.
The fund helped the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Department of Nutrition with gardening supplies for a study on the physical, mental, and emotional impact of gardening. Harris got to see first-hand how this program helped a breast cancer survivor who was also battling neck cancer. Treatment severely damaged the woman’s vocal cords, but through gardening she found a way to communicate with the world again.
“This gave her a voice,” Harris says. The woman began sharing vegetables from her garden with her church to encourage healthy eating and the confidence boost from gardening even gave her the courage to become a foster parent.
The WBHF has also invested in the Psychosocial Oncology Training Academy (POTA). Organized through the Department of Palliative and Supportive Care at UAB, POTA teaches healthcare professionals outside of oncology how to better care for patients who are breast cancer survivors.
“Once you’re diagnosed with breast cancer, you have a big oncology team around you, but then five years out, you’re back to your regular physician,” Rogers explains. “And a lot of the things that happen to you during breast cancer treatment have long term effects over the rest of your life. So how does that primary care physician know how to deal with the things you may be going through — hormonal changes, sexual changes, depression, anxiety, mental health challenges — whatever they may be?”
Forge On
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the Women’s Breast Health Fund has been the creation of Forge Breast Cancer Survivor Center.
Originally called the Breast Cancer Survivorship Rehabilitation Initiative (BCSRI), this effort began in 2014 with an unprecedented collaboration of all five major healthcare systems in Birmingham.
Community Foundation President and CEO Chris Nanni was a part of the formation of Forge from the beginning. “It was an unprecedented endeavor bringing four independent health systems together around one common goal — breast cancer survivorship. Madeline Harris was the driving force, and Susan Elliott Sellers, the head of St. Vincent’s Foundation at the time, facilitated the process. It was a true collaboration addressing a critical unmet need.”
“One of the purposes was to pull every healthcare executive leader around the table to think about what a woman with breast cancer and her family need,” Harris says.
With a spirit of community over competition, the healthcare leaders met monthly, sometimes for hours at a time.
“And they learned that they all had the same passion of providing this great care to breast cancer clients and their families,” Harris adds.
And they determined one of the best ways to provide that great care was through an organization like Forge. Hospitals that didn’t have patient navigation programs, or nutrition or mental health services for cancer patients could turn to Forge for support.
In 2020, Forge was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Recently recognized by the Birmingham Business Journal as one of the fastest growing local nonprofits, Forge offers a host of services including:
- Transportation to medical appointments
- Health and wellness classes
- Free mental health counseling
- Nutrition counseling
- Financial resources
- Support groups
- Wigs for patients undergoing chemotherapy.
“I will always say that to date of all of the things that we have done with the Women’s Breast Health Fund, Forge, by far, has had the biggest impact on this community,” Rogers says.
Looking Ahead
As the landscape of healthcare changes, Rogers and the other leaders of the Women’s Breast Health Fund know that the WBHF must change too. Now their focus is figuring out what the future of the fund should be. To determine this, they’re going straight to the source, once again.
“What the committee has decided now is that we need to know how we’re doing,” Rogers says. “And so, in the next year, we’ll do another comprehensive community assessment of breast cancer survivors and their loved ones, asking, what’s the next thing? What do you still need that you’re not getting?”
While Rogers is proud of all the Women’s Breast Health Fund has accomplished in the past 15 years, she knows there’s more work to be done.
“Because of the focus of the fund being survivorship, even if somebody today said, we have a cure for breast cancer, we have a huge number of women and families and loved ones and caregivers who have been affected by breast cancer who are not going to go away,” Rogers says. “The Women’s Breast Health Fund has made a huge difference in this community, but we’re not going to rest on our laurels; we’re going to keep going.”
For more information about the Women’s Breast Health Fund, contact Kim Rogers at krogers@cfbham.org.
Learn more: Forge Breast Cancer Survivor Center 2023 Annual Report