Latest / We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits / 249. How a Sister’s Enduring Promise Launched a Global Movement + The Next Promise Kept - Nancy Brinker

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249. How a Sister’s Enduring Promise Launched a Global Movement + The Next Promise Kept - Nancy Brinker · We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

• 0:01
  Becky Endicott: Hey friends, you know, we believe storytelling is the heartbeat of connection.
• 0:03
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• 0:19
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• 0:36
  Jonathan McCoy: Hey, I'm John.
• 0:36
  Jonathan McCoy: And I'm Becky. And this is the we are for good podcast.
• 0:41
  Becky Endicott: Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
• 0:50
  Jonathan McCoy: We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.
• 0:59
  Becky Endicott: So welcome to the good community, where Nonprofit Professionals, philanthropist, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
• 1:09
  Jonathan McCoy: So let's get started. It is this happening right now.
• 1:13
  Becky Endicott: It's happening we have humanity royalty kindness royalties in our house today. It's certainly just a profound honor and privilege that we get to speak with Nancy Brinker, the founder of Susan G.
• 1:26
  Becky Endicott: Komen for the Cure, and also the founder of the promise Fund, which is this incredible rising new movement that Nancy is CO leading that we're going to dive into today. But before we bring Nancy up, I just want to tell all of our listeners, you know that today's conversation is very much a love letter, to our sisters, to our mothers to women to a celebration of what they mean and what they can inspire because everything that's about to flow, from what we're about to discuss, comes down to just a girl loving her sister so much and I just want to give a tribute to Rachel Confor truly sister, Jessica purdham sauce, my sister who are our best friends. And I know you all have important women out there, but I just want to thank specifically Regan Meyer, who saw our ungettable get list and saw Nancy Brinker on there and made the connection to allow her to come on through this wonderful connection we have with the stand together foundation of which we are rabid fans of their wonderful mission. So I've got to introduce Nancy, even though I don't think she needs any introduction, but she is the founder of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure. She's dedicated her life to ridding the world of breast cancer for nearly 40 years. She has a litany of awards recognitions, and it's not because she stood up as a figurehead. It's because she got active. And she lifted her voice. And she did it with empathy, and she gathered community. And we are so geeked out to hear the story. And we want everyone listening to just kind of channel this through and find what is it about pouring into your passion and the things that are most important to you that could ignite movements like this. So please be listening for that. I also want to highlight this beautiful memoir that she wrote called promise me became a New York Times bestseller. And among all of these awards and all these things going on, Nancy has enough Moxie grit that she starts another nonprofit called the promise fund to Florida that she co founded with Julie Fisher Cummings and Laurie Silver's also have just two mighty women who have spent decades working to improve quality of life for men and women of all socio economic backgrounds and many different areas of needs. So we are delighted to have her here.
• 3:53
  Becky Endicott: Thank you for bringing your 40 years of experience building the world's most renowned breast cancer charity. To us. We love your deep and personal understanding of the cause. And it's all stemming from a promise you made to your sister Susie in 1980. And I want to leave it with one quote I promised my sister I do everything I could to stop the Heartless progression and social stigma of this disease, even if it took the rest of my life and it has Nancy Brinker, welcome to the we are for good podcast.
• 4:27
  Nancy Brinker: Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to be with you today. And I'm honored very honored that you would think I know anything anyone else doesn't know I really am deeply honored. Thank you.
• 4:37
  Becky Endicott: Well, we know you're just another human being breathing air but trying to do good on this earth but it is just such an extraordinary story and movement, a global movement and not just that the awareness, the research, the survivability.
• 4:52
  Becky Endicott: We've been at komen races many times but we want to get to know you we want you to take us back.
• 4:56
  Becky Endicott: We and we also So want to get to know Suzy, if you would allow us. So start kind of at the beginning and talk to us about your childhood? And what kind of led you to this moment?
• 5:09
  Nancy Brinker: You know, that's, that's a really sweet question.
• 5:12
  Nancy Brinker: And sometimes when you do have an organization, the person becomes kind of a, not a cartoon, but kind of a symbol.
• 5:20
  Nancy Brinker: But she was so full of goodness that there were times when she would, you know, take a little swat at me, but she was so full of goodness, that you could feel it every day, she was the most energetic active, and of course, much smaller than I she was a real beauty. And she, I mean, she was one of those girls that all the boys chased after in school. And I always though, however, was her protector, I was the person who protected her from curfews, and etc, etc. And we were very, very close friends, even though she was three years older than I. And we are first exchange together about philanthropy in about what we cared about, because all this is grounded. Honestly, with the luck we had with our parents, my parents, were the best parents in the world. And my mother had a very large extended family, those are the days when we had extended families living in the same town. And some of them were a couple of the older ones were German immigrants. So we had lost some of our family in the Holocaust, for my parents, because they suffered so much.
• 6:27
  Nancy Brinker: With that I didn't know I only knew one distant cousin who survived. But that gave us a gratitude for living in America period. This was post war and my father would have had us go into the service and been in the armed services if we were boys.
• 6:43
  Nancy Brinker: And instead, he wanted us to have useful lives. He believed, even though he was a very strong, successful guy, that women could do anything, given the opportunity. So I was very lucky. And Susie and I, when we were little girls, I was five and she was eight, we decided to she decided to do a backyard song and dance party, and we would raise money to give to the polio association. So the night came, and the day before the night because we were a little up slow on our organization of the show. And she looked at me and she said, You know what, Nanny, I think you've got to sing and dance and also the tickets. He said, I know I can't dance. I got Mommy put me into dance class and had to take me out. I can't dance and I can't sing. And she said, Oh, no, you'll be fine. Don't worry. Oh, sure. So I knew a singer from my parents record collection called Rosemary Clooney, who, by the way, George Clooney.
• 7:38
  Becky Endicott: I love Christmas. Yeah, she
• 7:40
  Nancy Brinker: had a couple of songs that I could kind of put the phrasing together but didn't really know how to sing it. And I got up on the stage, and I sang her songs and tried to dance, it was a disaster. But all the neighbors were so nice.
• 7:53
  Nancy Brinker: And they clapped and cheered like they were enjoying the near the very next day, we took our check for $51 to the Peoria polio Association, which was housed in our hospital, and I will never forget the look on the woman's faces. We handed her the check. I mean, this was a big deal for us. And, you know, she she said, You girls have done a great job. And Suzy was so excited. And she said, Well, why do you seek next year, we're going to have even a bigger show. I know, boy, now I'm really in for it. But that started my life. Because first it was my sister leading. And then it was all the things we have learned and everything kind of came together. And that circumstance in my life, when I was so young, really, truly made me realize how much fun it was to create something to make someone's life better. That's all I wanted to make other people's lives better. I was fortunate. We lived a very loving in a loving giving hard working family and with generous parents. And that did it that one event that we had really did it.
• 9:05
  Jonathan McCoy: I mean, we love hearing stories like this, because you know, I see you as this Titan in our industry that's, you know, at the front of the parade of all these women in behind you. But taking us back to that I see my daughter's and the love and the bonds and magic that happens at that young age does plant seeds. And to think that that planted a seed that went on to become what we know what komen has become. What the promise fund has already accomplished is just so humbling. So I want you to take us back. There's so much of your story. We want to just bask in but take us to the early stages of organizing.
• 9:44
  Nancy Brinker: Oh boy. Oh boy, nothing worth doing is ever easy because if it was easy, everybody be doing it or whatever. And you always have to expect that not everything works out the way you planned it But things can work out with a whole lot of unexpected things that make it even better. And by that, I mean, we had kind of planned what we would do. I got a group of friends together.
• 10:10
  Nancy Brinker: Later on much later on. When Susie died or was dying, and she asked me to cure breast cancer, she asked me two weeks before she died to do this. And I said, Of course I will. I had no idea what I was committing to really, I had no idea but I knew I had to get after it. And that was in about 19 End of 1979 1980. She died 1980 It was just Yeah, it was a few weeks before she died.
• 10:36
  Nancy Brinker: And she said, I want to make sure that even if you can spend the rest of your life making sure nobody has this disease, she would never admit she was dying. She used to say always her words were when I get better. And I told a lot of people with young dying relatives that sometimes the language they use because they don't want to say when I die.
• 10:56
  Nancy Brinker: It's not even a concept you can grasp at that age. And she was only 33 years old with two children, a loving husband, a community she adored and doing all kinds of things. She worked in the Junior League kind of tirelessly, she started other things. And we did a lot of these things together. Anyway, when she passed away it was I didn't think any of us would recover. My parents were bereft.
• 11:23
  Nancy Brinker: We all struggled in our own way to figure out the path forward.
• 11:28
  Nancy Brinker: So we started this organization.
• 11:28
  Nancy Brinker: By that time I was living in Dallas, Texas, I had married a wonderful man named Norman Brinker, who really was kind of the father of the casual dining segment of the restaurant industry. He had a company called steak and Ale, which he sold Bennigan's. Then he sold those and bought another company called Chili's, which most people still are familiar with today. And he was an amazing human being, because unlike a lot of very successful people, he didn't care so much about how much money he made, he cared about building a team, giving other people opportunities. And he ran it, like a football coach would run a team. It wasn't like, frankly, some of the things we see today, this grab for more money, more power. I wasn't interested in that at all. And yet he ended up with a company of over 100,000 employees. And I can't even tell you how many restaurants it kept growing and growing and growing.
• 12:18
  Nancy Brinker: So one day I came home, after we had this very short courtship and got married very quickly.
• 12:27
  Nancy Brinker: And I said to him, Norman, I've got to figure out what I'm going to do to honor my promise to Susan, are you going to mind what I choose? And if I give all my time do it. He said, No. I'd rather you do that. And go take a job you weren't excited about and and not do it? Well, he said, I think you have some talent. And you just have to learn some things. And I'll be there to coach you. And do it. I can't. So we went to bed that night. And about three o'clock in the morning, I woke up. And I saw my sister and her friends dressed in pink, carrying swords and running towards something they were running. And I said, Norman, I have to tell you this, I woke him up and he said, Oh, honey, can we talk about this in the morning? I said, No, we got to talk about it right now. So he said, I just don't know how, what do you want to do? And I said, Well, it's gonna it's a race. It's a run, it's we're running, they were running towards something, they were trying to get rid of something and go towards something better.
• 13:21
  Nancy Brinker: And he said, well see if you can get a volunteer marketing company, tell him what you're about your dream. And then see if you can put a concept together. And but before you do that, you better commit a lot of your friends to work with you on this project. So that's what I did. The next day I smart, all my friends. And they agreed to help because remember, in those days, you couldn't use the word breast in print, print, TV or radio, no public media, and you really weren't supposed to use the word breast in public, it was kind of taboo. So Oh, great.
• 13:53
  Nancy Brinker: We've got a disease, it's killing. I went to the library got all these books about cancer and breast cancer. And I said, we're we're dealing here with a disease that's exploding in size as women age, obviously. And nobody knows what's causing it.
• 14:07
  Nancy Brinker: And nobody can talk about it because we can't use the word breast. So what am I supposed to do? So I got the girls together, and we decided we would have a big luncheon. And we would invite Betty Ford. And then we wouldn't have to say Betty Ford, our first lady who had in 1976 breast cancer and who changed the public in recognition of this disease. We didn't ever have to say breast again all that we put it on our invitation. But Betty came and came to every single one of our lunches for the next. I think it was 25 or 30 years, as long as she could. And that day when the doors opened in the hotel in Dallas, and we had almost seven or 800 people there. It was stunning to me how many people this was touching. These are people who wouldn't talk about it couldn't even stand they saw friends to die, they just say, Oh, they had the big C was not breast cancer, it's a big C. So right about that time, a few weeks before I come up with this race idea and wanted to explore it. So on our last meeting before the big luncheon event, I told everybody what I thought we should do, we should follow it up with a grassroots event because we couldn't do everything, just raising a lot of money in one ballroom, Dallas, Texas, there was no way we needed a grassroots movement to go with it. So the next year, we created the Race for the Cure. And we had seven or 800 people who showed up, everybody said, nobody's gonna show up and run for breast cancer. Nobody said, Okay, well, let's see, maybe they'll bring their dog or their child or whatever. And on the race day, I fully expected that we would have about 50 people that would show up the, you know, the committee, their families, and that's it. When those cars started coming towards the parking lot on the race site, I knew, I knew we had something I knew we had something that could communicate and translate and grow. And that's what my husband had given me a series of lessons he said, Whatever concept you come up with, you must rate for its ability to travel, it must relate to everyone, not just where you have it. But if you want it to grow, you know the old adage, go at it alone, if you want to grow, have partners.
• 16:17
  Nancy Brinker: So it took us a couple of months to figure out the model. And the model would be that these affiliates would leave 75% of what they raised or on their races or whatever they were doing, and give us 25% from the national charity, so we could fund science. And we had a fight, we had created one of the best scientific committees, I think of any charity, or even frankly, at that time, even the government, even though President Nixon had declared the war on cancer 10 years before, but we had one heck of a medical advisory committee. So we started with my husband's admonition you must have an A concept that everyone relates to and can travel. You know, my my other friends used to say to me, we don't answer you take this on. And it's other friends would say it was like you're you're trying to cure cancer. And that makes it so hard. But in fact, we weren't trying to cure cancer. So we took it seriously.
• 17:12
  Nancy Brinker: And we knew what it was going to cost us in personal time and anything. Anyway, the first race for that cure, I knew when we had 800 people show up that we had a success there, and we had to bottle whatever that was. So I spent that entire time walking around the parking lot. We also had an MR. graphy van, one of the very first mammography vans pulled up to the site. So women could see there was a place to detect their breast cancer early, and all those things together, created this group that grew and grew and grew, we had great leadership.
• 17:49
  Nancy Brinker: Eventually, we hired our first executive director, then we had a wonderful board of directors who supported me and my dream and all the rest of our people.
• 18:02
  Nancy Brinker: So that's how it happened. And every year we had more people offering to do affiliates, we ended up having something like at the height of its size 140 affiliates throughout the country and globally, and all the way to the Caribbean and many other countries. And then the more science we funded and the more throughput that brought us were those were the those were the outcomes of what we were doing it caught on. And everybody wanted a Race for the Cure in their state, everybody wanted one in their town. And then we had to put limits on it and grow as fast as we could.
• 18:32
  Nancy Brinker: But understanding we were building expenses as we did. And that's really the other lesson I learned. You have to be very careful when you grow something, because you have to know how much it's gonna cost. And when it comes to expensive, it no longer can function. So you've got to be prepared to change to adapt to the current environment, whatever it is. And a lot of people don't want to do that. Because it's comfortable doing the same thing over and over and over again, that works and works and works. And the money's coming in. Sooner or later. That wasn't a story after about 35 years, 30 years, we noticed our revenues were incredibly high hundreds of millions of dollars every year, but so are our expenses getting like that. And it was very hard to imagine scaling this back.
• 19:20
  Nancy Brinker: But it had to be done. So that's why eventually, I began to work through another vehicle that I've started now called the promise Fund, which is very, very small, very controlled in terms of what we spend and don't spend, and and et cetera. I can talk a little bit later about that. But I'm very proud of what Susan Komen did. We funded over a billion and a half dollars of basic science and research, most of which is responsible for the new drugs that are out today.
• 19:52
  Nancy Brinker: Whether they're in immunology, whether they're in advanced, whether they're in genetics, whatever it is screening, we provide a lot of grants for the scientists to produce these kinds of products. And then we gave over $2.2 billion to communities all over the world so that they could do screening programs, they could have these affiliate groups who were also raising money to be used in their hometown. And then some, of course, it was still segregated to the research program. So I'm very happy about that. And yet, when I went overseas, and I did have a government career, in the middle of all this 10 years, went to Hungary first where I was appointed ambassador, and kind of did the same thing all over again, we did a pink bridge walk there, that was so exciting with the country of Hungary with their government, their health minister, and with our embassy, because you're not really allowed to carry on your interests in another country, when you once you once you agree to be an ambassador. So you're supposed to be working for the United States of America, which we were, this was one of the most successful events the women had there had ever had. Many of them were in the same place. We were 20 years ago, from that point, talking about breast cancer. So that was a great success there. And it went on every year, up until the major chairman of that passed away herself of breast cancer just a few years ago, which was very sad. But it brought the subject out of the clouds, and people could talk about it. And then I came back and work some more with some other appointments, I was given by the Bush administration, very, I went to become the ambassador to the WH O for cancer control. So I got to learn a lot on sort of a world scale of where we were with cancer and breast cancer all over the world, which countries had the worst problems, which countries were doing the best they could. And it was after that, that I moved back to Florida, which we live between Florida and Texas, and I declared Florida my home because my parents were still living and I wanted to be close to them.
• 21:54
  Nancy Brinker: But I began to notice the drift, the immigration of people coming into our state, and how ill prepared we were for the this phenomenon. Why because we have a state that has property taxes, not any state taxes, which which actually is a good thing for the people moving. But it did not allow us to build the infrastructure to deal with low resource pace patients and people. So it took me a while to really look around and see and realize we had to do something that was much more granular. It wasn't enough to do an event and give money, we had to change the system.
• 23:10
  Jonathan McCoy: Hey, friends, we've got to pause the podcast for a minute, we have some really exciting news to share.
• 23:15
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• 23:20
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• 23:24
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• 23:35
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• 23:45
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• 24:03
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• 24:47
  Nancy Brinker: So this systemic change is really what we do with the promise fund we decided to look very carefully at how our healthcare system and it's very complex is set up in Florida.
• 24:58
  Nancy Brinker: Some cities like Tampa, and Jacksonville and the northern cities have not for profit hospitals so they're able to do charity care, but where we live in Palm Beach County, which is the third largest county in the third largest state in the country. We have abject poverty in a big part of our county. We have only for profit health care here because of a system a political system that didn't quite work in the favor of people and and other things and a hospital system that wasn't willing to come because it wasn't very dense in the middle of Florida, it was really considered a leisure place. To live, so I kept watching it and watching it and then realizing how many men women were dying from cervical and breast cancer.
• 25:41
  Nancy Brinker: So that's when one night I realized and said to myself, the only way we're going to ever get around our hands around this problem is by promising our community that we will erase this problem. And it won't be based on necessarily event based, but it will be based on consciousness raising, everybody will want to do something, because everybody involved in this is living here. People want to get their own health care where they live. Number one, number two, people were ready after the wars we've had and and some of the name calling we've had and in our country, they were ready to come back to their communities and work. It was a safe place. It was the place we lived. And let's start by making our community a better place to live. And that included health care. So we spent a couple of months looking at the model. We have a health care district that does give some payment reimbursement to patients, but it really isn't enough. And then we realized, we really didn't have the caretakers because these people couldn't just go to hospitals. They were for profit.
• 26:41
  Nancy Brinker: They didn't have any insurance.
• 26:45
  Nancy Brinker: They didn't even it weren't qualified for Medicare, and there wasn't enough Medicaid in the state. So what were they going to do? Well, that's where we decided to bring on the community based navigators.
• 26:53
  Nancy Brinker: Navigators are people who are between being nurses and social workers. And we brought on over time 10 of them, their job is to reach into their community, the language that they speak, the friendships they have, and bring them to what we call the federally qualified health care center system, which all of us have in America, and most of us don't even know, but their centers based and funded by the government for primary health care, and they're darn good, I have to tell you, it's a great system. What they didn't have, though, was screening and diagnosis. So I was able to get through a long term relationship with a company called Hole logic. They donated one of their great pieces of equipment to us.
• 27:42
  Nancy Brinker: We donated it to found care to our federally qualified health care center, subsidized the mammograms by raising money on the events so that we could get to that 80,000 population 80,000 women had not had any screening in our county, it was unbelievable to us. So we got to work, got the machine donated.
• 28:04
  Nancy Brinker: On the day it came on, I'm making it sound a lot simpler than it was because we had to get through all kinds of little,
• 28:11
  Becky Endicott: we've worked in healthcare, we get what you're saying, Oh, it's complicated, and it moves slowly.
• 28:18
  Nancy Brinker: And we didn't have the time to move slowly, we saw this population going like this. And we had to get going with it. So we we committed to screen every woman for cervical and breast cancer in Palm Beach County, which is dying 100,000 over time. But this was our immediate population, these 80,000 women living on the west of our county. So we get that to work. We immediately started with our navigators getting them trained, reaching their communities. And now I can tell you that on Friday, March 4, since last November, we have educated, screened, diagnosed and treated over 16,000 of those patients. So it works, the system works that we've created.
• 29:05
  Nancy Brinker: It is a system of already built facilities, us providing a cushion of philanthropy, and having these wonderful navigators who are constantly every day ingrained in what they're doing. Guiding patients teaching them helping them get to the system they need to get to, and us continuing to beg, barter we didn't we haven't stolen anything. Try to get care for a continuum of care. Because the one thing you don't want to do is screen someone find they have an early cancer, and you have nowhere to treat it. And so far we've had women we've had about 60 cancers, we've only had six or seven that are beyond maybe stage two, and all of them have been in treatment, we figured a way to get them there.
• 29:52
  Nancy Brinker: And now we're working on even a bigger scale to get more treatment donated. And that's what we're doing now. Every day is a new walk in the in the dark every day is a new walk up another hill. But we are so committed and excited about what we're doing. And to see these women actually get through a system and then remember, they have a relationship there. Now, these are people who had no medical home, many of them had never been to a primary doctor.
• 30:22
  Nancy Brinker: And and so they now feel the confidence that they have someone to reach out to their navigator. So that's pretty much the story and we're working hard on getting a state grant to increase Our work, we want to increase the number of navigators. And we are working on the federal appropriation that President Biden has worked hard on, and the moon shots program, and then we're out talking to everyone, because we recognize at this stage in our history, we need a transformational gift. And something that we know we can use for innovation, more more outcomes, and in all the things that we do. And then at that point, we know we are ready to replicate this model. We are not building a national charity, we're building a model that works and can overcome the people running it in this whatever area this happens in replication issues, different issues that occur in communities, because people can solve those a lot faster than with a government, a large government program. And Nancy,
• 31:29
  Becky Endicott: Diane Brinker, I'm kidding, I don't know what your middle name is. I'm just creating drama. But there's so much to unpack here. I just think about Hannah brancher talks about listening to your nudges. And I think about what if Nancy would have gone back to bed and thought that that was just a dream of pink swords? And people who lean into their passion? Listen to their nudges scale. So smartly, listen, they don't do it on their own. They bring people smart people along.
• 32:05
  Becky Endicott: The fact that you have built Coleman, in an era without social media blows my mind.
• 32:09
  Becky Endicott: Scare that.
• 32:14
  Nancy Brinker: One funny story I have to tell you is that when you say it, it is kind of funny, because people assume you had social media. And I said no, no, no typewriter reader donate yes writer. And we had donated a secretary who couldn't type. So we really had a problem. We had postcards, you all don't even know what those are. We had postcards. And we had we did all of Coleman on a telephone until the first computer came out. It was your personal person was
• 32:44
  Becky Endicott: just so organic.
• 32:44
  Becky Endicott: I mean, this is a talk about grass roots, and I, and all as you're talking in this, just the winding nature, from Dallas to hungry to Florida, and but I but I also just see you doing what you said in the first minute, which is you took care of Suzy.
• 33:02
  Becky Endicott: And now you just keep taking care of the person in front of you. And you're taking what you've learned. And that's what I mean, I really want to dig into the promise fund. Because what you just said there I don't want anyone to miss it is we're not building a national charity.
• 33:21
  Becky Endicott: We're building a framework and a model. And this people is how you revolutionize mission work is you take what you know what you learn, you share it, because we all want to accelerate faster, we want to get rid of these diseases. And I just had to share a personal story because I just keep thinking about these pink swords. I remember when John and I did our employee giving campaign at our healthcare institution, we were setting up a photoshoot. And we had had eight employees while represented different passions, burns, pediatrics, hospice, etc.
• 33:53
  Becky Endicott: And our woman that we chose to profile cancer, her name was Monica. And she was a seven time breast cancer survivor. Wow. And we ended up losing her about 18 months after that campaign. But everybody came kind of in their scrubs and their work outfit, Monica changed. She she kept her scrub pants on, she put her komen shirt on, she wrapped a pink boa around her. And she let her bald head shine. And it was like an everybody knew what Monica had been through. And we didn't have to put a word out there. And that is the power of a brand. And that is a power.
• 34:33
  Becky Endicott: When I see basketball players wearing pink shoes at a game it is that color has become a movement in the promise fund how you were able to go into your community see a disparaging difference and in how people are being treated. You poured what you knew into it. I'm just entirely geeked out, John, I know you want to vote. So go for it.
• 34:55
  Jonathan McCoy: I just want to say I pity the poor fool who challenges when Nancy makes a promise. I'm just like you are fighting. And now this is your next chapter. Like it's this promise to women that are flying under the radar that nobody's seeing that our system is missing. And we know it's hard.
• 35:13
  Jonathan McCoy: Like we know it's got to be so difficult but the way that you're rebuilding and kind of building this completely differently plays into what we're trying to talk about on this podcast. I'd love for you to go into that because we think that using kind of the principles of business with this heart of of the mission is unstoppable. And I want to hear you know, what is your plan for how you're building this framework and what are you learning? And what can you kind of offer to us?
• 35:37
  Nancy Brinker: Well, I got a ticket when you said, anybody who tells me I can't do it, the minute somebody says, I can't do it, what some things you can't do, like I, you can't jump off a mountain generally land on your feet. But John, and Becky, it's really interesting part of how this occurred is we had the hospitals we had here many years ago in Palm Beach County were kind of like, mid level hospitals, they were not for profits, they, they did okay with a very small population, but it wasn't going to last. So they then unfortunately, and fortunately, a couple of not for profit hospital systems came and bought them. And I think this is what was the beginning of what it was, they do not have charity care. And so already right there, and then the people, so we have what they call the health care district and our local property taxes we pay into a health care district not to go into deeply. Unfortunately, the funds they give people to work with, aren't nearly enough to be treating diseases that are growing quickly. All timers, not just cancer, all the other diseases that are plaguing, we have an elderly community, and now we have a working community.
• 36:45
  Nancy Brinker: But it's not enough. And Obamacare, which is which is a really good model, by the way, and what they use in the Federally Qualified Health Care Center, because they take what you have in your pocket. And then they give you the rest. And it's a great, great concept. But there were barriers all the way.
• 37:04
  Nancy Brinker: In the Federally Qualified center, they only do primary care. So they couldn't do diagnostic or a woman with a cervical cancer often needs a procedure called a colposcopy.
• 37:15
  Nancy Brinker: They couldn't do that there, there was a lot of what they couldn't do. But we were focused on what they could do. And the fact that we could get them to gather women have a name, have them understand when you see promise fund, you know, somebody's there to care for you, you know, somebody, there is a system there. And then I think when we went to these meetings, and we went to visit two of the largest health care foundations here, which had been given the money that when they sold the hospitals, they put these two large amounts of money in so that was helpful, except that a couple of the people said to me, Nancy, we know that you're intense. And I had to best my best friends with me.
• 37:55
  Nancy Brinker: And they said, but we're just not sure you can do this, that it's going to work. And I said, So are you telling me it won't work? And they said, Yeah, basically, it's you're gonna find it work? And I said, Okay, we'll say, thank you very much for the meeting. And that was it. That's all I had to hear. I don't like the word no, I don't like to hear it can't be done.
• 38:16
  Nancy Brinker: Because most of the time it can be done. Yes. If you find out here are the barriers, how do we step over them? Sometimes you have to modulate something, sometimes you have to reconstruct your model. But if the feeling is there, and you start with the end in mind, Stephen Covey used to say, start with the end in mind, you have a much better chance of completing what you're doing. And all along the way, we've heard all kinds of things like, Oh, well, the federal government will pay for this. Oh, well, we have the health care district. No, no, no, we don't have any of that together. We all needed to be systemic. So that's really what's happened. And with every victory we have, we often publicize the patients who are successful. We grow all the time, if we've raised enough money, bring on a another navigator to open up yet another part of the community, someone who speaks a language, we have several very at risk communities, black women are 40% more likely to die of breast cancer, Hispanic women, pretty much the same, only their disease generally develops later, where you might have a better chance of getting it early. Elderly Jewish women often have the genetic, the bracket gene. That's actually what I have and why I developed breast cancer a few years after my sister died. But the point is, every day, we're discovering a new part of the community every day, we're discovering a way to do what we're doing easier. Pairing with people partnering with people using their facilities, offering them bartering with them will give you this data for example, we have a data, a wonderful data company sa s is working with us and whole logic, which is the company who gave us the mammography equipment. So we're working with them to collect useful data. Well, they need that and we need that to understand what our patients respond to, at what stage in their disease, it does become absolutely necessary for us to have a later care physician and oncologist involved, at what point and then we got all the physicians. There's a program called patient access and our medical society and we got them to come in and volunteer that they would give some services.
• 40:28
  Nancy Brinker: So everybody has to give something if they want to be part of the promise fund.
• 40:31
  Nancy Brinker: Everybody has to be Give something. And if it's sometimes just wisdom, or pointing to a company, he was coming to town where we immediately run over and try to get some more money.
• 40:41
  Nancy Brinker: We decided we didn't want to do another ball. Because expensive, very expensive. So what we did do, because COVID was starting in Oh, this is the end of every charity, oh, this is going to be terrible. I said, No, it's not, it's a good challenge. It's the beginning of what we're going to do. Right. So what we did was we created an event called DASH and dying. And we got one of the owners of the nicest private club here, he agreed that if we had our donors pull up in their cars, first we analyzed, what do they like about a ball? Well, they get to dress up, they like their picture taken, they have a chance to have some good food, and they listen to good music.
• 41:22
  Nancy Brinker: And, you know, they get to go home in a certain time. So we said, okay, we can create that with this event, we're going to have them drive up in front of the front of your club, will take it over for the night for a couple of hours, and outside are going to be pink lights flashing, and we're gonna have a DJ with the best music, and we're going to tell them to bring their dogs in the car, we're going to tell them where all your jewelry to everything you do, I come into loving this.
• 41:47
  Nancy Brinker: And when you drive by, we're going to put a great big hamper of food in your car. So it's dash and dying, you can take it home. And by that time, your pictures will be on the news at 10 o'clock. So and then the next day your pictures will be in the paper, everybody loved it. And actually, we're getting close in revenues, what we used to raise it the ball. That's amazing, you know, and then to create the revenues we have, but people realized, this is different.
• 42:11
  Nancy Brinker: This is what we're direct service into our community. And then we're looking at other things differently ways to do things and to get people to give. And, you know, it's happening, because they see, we publish our data, we have a newsletter that goes out, it's really active and, you know, tells them what they want to know,
• 42:30
  Becky Endicott: the reason that they act is because you've built something that is so trusted, you've built this brand in this organization, and you as a brand are so trusted, you're so human, I want to compliment you on the dignity that you have baked into every single part of every organization that you've created, you've given women a chance to lift their voice, not even to just just gather, we're talking about these issues, and the fact that you have democratized everything that you've done. Because all you want to do is help you just want to scale is just aspirational. I love the event story. I think that's a great example, in case study for anybody who's looking on how to pivot these events, because I think that was so whimsical. And it very much matches what you do when you show up at these events. It's joyful, it's informing, we don't want you to just come and have a good time I want you to get educated and to lean in. And so I compliment you on all that.
• 43:32
  Becky Endicott: And, you know, we just love story care in our community. And we believe connecting with another human being and just hearing about something that moves them personally, is something that creates a bridge to more empathy. So I would love to know about a story of philanthropy, I can't even imagine how many you've heard in your life that has touched you and change you.
• 43:54
  Nancy Brinker: Well, one of them has been actually with men, we have a group called the pink tie guys. And it was suggested to us and I thought you Oh, that's not gonna work. Number one, and I and I think it's gonna work.
• 44:07
  Nancy Brinker: What do you think you're doing nice? Well, we could charge a lot of money, they could come to the club, we could take a picture, and put them all in chairs. And I thought that's it.
• 44:18
  Nancy Brinker: That's it right there. The team picture so every year, right before we do our our dash and dine in our Thank you dinner, we have what we call a pink tie guy night. And all the guys in town, who will give us a certain amount of money are invited to come. They're seated next to each other on a platform on these chairs. And with their pink tie. The company has been so wonderful to us gives them their ties, and they're just excited as can be in and they sit there and have their picture taken. And then they get up and they have their glass of wine or their cocktail and they run home because they know their picture is going to be in the paper the next day, because they're proud of what they're doing and they know their wives will be happy with what they're doing. Yes.
• 45:01
  Nancy Brinker: Just things like that. You tap into people's desires and watch them carefully you'll figure out something that tweaks their mind that the tweaks they're giving side. You get it
• 45:13
  Jonathan McCoy: okay Nancy, we end all our conversations asking for you to boil down your wisdom to one sage piece of advice. We call it our one good thing what's something you could leave our audience it can be a mantra, a life hack, just anything.
• 45:25
  Nancy Brinker: No means maybe.
• 45:25
  Nancy Brinker: No means maybe don't ever forget it. Never take no without the maybe And then maybe means that maybe if you tweak it, maybe if you do it a little differently because something gave you a good idea someone gave you or something touched your heart, listen to your heart and no means maybe,
• 45:48
  Becky Endicott: well, there you have it from the queen of innovation. And, you know, I want you to connect people with komen with the promise fund, I really want them to know about this framework, where can people go to access this information and get involved.
• 46:07
  Nancy Brinker: So the best place to do that is our fabulous website, the promise fund of florida.org. And on there, you can get on and if you join the organization, and I think we have a membership, one that's$20. We have others that just send us a check. And we'll every month send a newsletter. And what we like about our newsletters, it's newsy. And it's relates to everybody. And you see the progress we're making you actually see our progress, like the last thing we did was pink boots on the ground. And we took one of the bridges that came into Palm Beach and lit it pink. And everyone said, Oh my God, are they gonna let you do that? I said, of course, they're gonna let us do it. They're gonna do it for a month. What do you mean a month? They'll only do it for one night? I said, No, they won't. They'll do it for longer.
• 46:54
  Nancy Brinker: You'll see. So we went to the city guy that hangs the lights and got the certificate. And he said, Well, you know, if you do it in January, we actually could leave it up longer because the rest of the charities don't start doing their stuff. The I said, See, so me, maybe that means maybe. And so we have this pink thing. And then we all wore pink boots, which we bought on Amazon pink rain boots to wear on that walk, and we wear our pink boots a lot. And when people see us they know what that means. They means Oh, Kid your checkbook out or Okay, what do I need to sign up for now.
• 47:27
  Nancy Brinker: But it's just it adds a humor it adds a symbols are important.
• 47:31
  Nancy Brinker: Symbols, say a jillion words,
• 47:35
  Becky Endicott: and the levity and the joy. And I just have to say that this whole concept of race of walking of moving forward, that is what every single one of your organization's has done. It has pushed the bounds of what people talk about. It's pushed the bounds of science, it's pushed the bounds of survivability.
• 47:52
  Becky Endicott: Thank you for moving us forward in everything that you do. And I just have to think that when you see Suzy again, she is going to give you the biggest hug and just tell you, well done.
• 48:04
  Nancy Brinker: Thank you so much. And you know, the only thing I want to say is the other thing that I hope we've added into our community is great diversity and health equity.
• 48:12
  Nancy Brinker: Thank you. And those really are our two goals right there. And we have and I don't want to go anywhere fast, but I hope I do get to see my sister again.
• 48:20
  Becky Endicott: Nancy Brinker keep bordering on you and cheering for you.
• 48:25
  Nancy Brinker: Thank you for having me on today. I'm so honored. There are a jillion people you could have had to have much better stories than I do. But I'm so proud to be here representing all of our workers, and volunteers and patients who've benefited from the promise of I'm Thank you.
• 48:41
  Jonathan McCoy: Thank you.
• 48:41
  Jonathan McCoy: Thanks for joining us. Today's episode was brought to you by our good friends at auth zero.
• 48:47
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• 49:02
  Becky Endicott: if you enjoyed this episode, we know you'll love being part of the we're for good community. It's like our own social network where you can find like minded friends ask questions, share resources and find inspiration anytime. Sign up today at we are for good.com backslash hello
• 49:18
  Jonathan McCoy: thanks friends.
• 49:22
  Becky Endicott: Today we're reimagining nonprofit professional development for good we are over the moon excited to announce the launch of we're for good pro. Here you'll discover new workshops, live coaching and exclusive content added monthly investing yourself grow alongside community and take your mission to the next level. Learn more at we are for good pro.com