Mission In Action

August  Focus: Treasure Your Health: A Pilot Program for Bringing the Komen Promise to Women with Disabilities and the Communities that Support Them

 

The Affiliate's participation with Practice Without Pressure at the June 11-12 summer Special Olympic Games in Delaware has gained us attention from Komen National Headquarters. The week following the event, The Affiliate was asked to put together a case study/summary of our participation for Komen Headquarters to use in response to an inquiry made to Ambassador Nancy G. Brinker (Komen Founder and CEO) by Maria Shriver, First Lady of California and staunch advocate for Special Olympics.

 

It is an honor and definite source of pride in our achievements to be asked to help educate Komen on our initiative with the Special Olympics in Delaware. Our program will hopefully soon become a pilot program for other Komen Affiliates serving communities that also host Special Olympics to empower women with disabilities and their caregivers against breast cancer. In addition, we have helped pave a path for empowering this audience even beyond Special Olympic cities.

 

To follow are excerpts from the Treasure Your Health Case Study:

 

 

Background

 

In late winter of 2010, a team from Practice Without Pressure (PWP), a Komen Philadelphia Affiliate grantee headquartered in Newark, DE, came to The Affiliate with a partnership proposal to give us both a presence at the 2010 Special Olympic Delaware Summer Games.  All three counties of Delaware fall within the service area of The Affiliate.  What resulted was an inroad for The Affiliate to a relatively untapped community of men and women with disabilities, their caregivers and organizations that serve them, as well as connections with important influencers in Delaware healthcare policy.

 

PWP and The Affiliate decided to create "Treasure Your Health," an interactive educational tent that would be part of the Healthy AthletesTM program at the 2010 Special Olympics Delaware Summer Games, on June 11 and 12. Our initiative marked the first time in recent history breast health would be a component of the Healthy Athletes program -- established in 2001 to promote healthy lifestyles through information, support and screening. Other topics in the 2010 program included dental care, optometry, being tobacco free and injury prevention and flexibility,

 

Treasure Your Health is an excellent example of the grassroots dynamics that make Susan G. Komen for the Cure a global leader in the breast cancer movement, with the key players in our local initiative being Practice Without Pressure the Komen Philadelphia Affiliate and Special Olympics Delaware.

 

 

 

Important Lessons About this Special Audience

 

Designed for both Special Olympic athletes and their caregivers, the objective of "Treasure Your Health" was to educate and create a comfort level on the following breast health topics:

  • Knowing and understanding key breast cancer facts

  • How to be aware of risks and warning signs

  • Performing breast self-exams

  • The importance of mammograms

  • Practice Without Pressure's "Women's Health Initiative"

 

Respecting the special needs of this audience, we took care to create a learning opportunity that balanced education with something that would engage as well as make the knowledge "stick." The components were designed to be:

  • Fun

  • Interactive

  • Non-threatening

  • Complete in their information, yet not overwhelming

  • Rewarding

    • Immediate gratification - nominal prizes were given for anyone completing all stages of the exhibit.

    • Long-term - the importance of what we had to offer for a richer, healthier life was certainly not lost on anyone participating in Treasure Your Health.

 

In addition, the exhibit atmosphere needed to assure the complete comfort of our guests. Doing so for this audience provided important lessons, one of the key lessons being that what many of us think makes for a "flashy and impressive" presence is not always necessary, nor advisable for certain audiences. As examples, the Treasure Your Health Exhibit was:

  • Open: While our activity area was clearly defined and "contained" it, it was not enclosed, creating a safer, more open atmosphere to help minimize any anxieties that our visitors may have experienced.

  • Simple: The exhibits themselves were not overly sophisticated-there were not a lot of bells-and-whistles, and there was more of a "hand crafted" feel to them than something overly technical or produced by a high-end exhibit vendor. Again, this all contributed to creating a comfort level, while at the same time engaging our visitors and conveying the messages. While we did not "talk down" to them, instead, we met them at an intellectual level that made them feel the power they have over breast cancer.

 

Finally, at each learning station there were volunteers and staff from PWP and The Affiliate to further engage visitors, provide more information/literature, and let each person go as far with their learning as they were comfortable in doing. After completing each station's activities, the volunteer gave the Athlete a token to be cashed in at the end for fun prizes including pink cupcakes, boas and beads.

 

 

 

Connections

The opportunities presented by "Treasure Your Health" resulted in powerful connections between The Affiliate and these key audiences.

 

1. Practice Without Pressure

Our enthusiasm for the PWP proposal itself, as well as for not just helping them execute their vision for "Treasure Your Health," but enhancing it, helped to further nurture a very important relationship in our community grants program. We feel one of the most important aspects of our community grants program is full diversity in the types of people we reach. Special needs communities are every bit as important as African-American communities, women in need, etc., in achieving the overall mission that no woman is left behind in the quest to end breast cancer forever.

 

2. Special Olympics

The Affiliate also entered a new relationship with Special Olympics Delaware, which we feel will give us the opportunity to make "Treasure Your Health," or a similar program, an ongoing fixture in the Healthy Athletes program for future Summer Games. Moreover, we may find opportunities with this organization outside of the Games at other times during the year.

 

3. Delaware Policy Influencers

Several Delaware politicians were invited by us to visit "Treasure Your Health" specifically at the Games. As a result, we were visited by: Senator Thomas Carper, U.S. Senate, Delaware; and Rita Landgraf, Secretary of Delaware Health & Social Services.

 

The Affiliate was able to connect with each of these people to provide them with more information on what Susan G. Komen for the Cure is doing locally and globally to advance the breast cancer movement, as well as to reinforce our mission in terms of breast healthcare policy.

 

4. The Community of Individuals with Disabilities

In the two days of "treasure Your Health," approximately 700 people from this community had the opportunity to learn about The Affiliate and experience first hand the impact we can make in empowering everyone to live in a world without breast cancer.  In addition, the composition of this audience makes another powerful contribution to our mission of diversity, for it included: male and female Special Olympics athletes; parents, grandparent, siblings, family and friends; caregivers; and Special Olympics volunteers.