Before the Battle of the Corporate Walkathons, There Was The Women and Cancer Walk

[Guest guest]

http://www.bcaction.org/Pages/SearchablePages/2003Newsletters/Newsletter79A.html

 

Newsletter #79–November/December 2003

Before the Battle of the Corporate Walkathons, There Was The Women and Cancer

Walk

by Carrie Spector

One day in 1991, two San Francisco women riding in a local AIDS bike-a-thon

found themselves musing that so many young women they knew were being diagnosed

with cancer.

 

“We were in our 30s—it was scary,” recalls Nancy Levin, one of the cyclists.

 

“We were really shaken up about it,” agrees Joanne Connelly, whose roommate’s

40-something boss had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and was

undergoing surgery that weekend. “On the bike ride, while we were pedaling, I

said something like, ‘I sure wish we could create a fund-raiser like this for

breast cancer,’” Joanne remembers. “And Nancy said something like, ‘That’s a

great idea. Why don’t we organize one?’”

 

And so what became a beloved San Francisco Bay Area institution was launched:

the Women and Cancer Walk, a truly grassroots predecessor to the large-scale

corporate-sponsored walkathons that dominate the breast cancer fund-raising

landscape today.

 

As the Susan G. Komen Foundation launches its new three-day walk for breast

cancer this month, competing with Avon in the most ambitious and lucrative of

breast cancer fund-raisers, it seems worth remembering the community-oriented

approach that came before and imagining how organizers today might build on that

model.

Diversified Funding

Within days of the AIDS bike ride, Nancy recruited her friend Abby Zimberg, who

had been diagnosed with melanoma herself and had recently lost a friend to

breast cancer. About a week later, Nancy, Abby, and Joanne gathered at a café to

begin brainstorming.

 

Activists by nature and experience, the three women had certain expectations in

mind for the event they were planning. For starters, they wanted to be sure that

it benefited diverse community groups.

 

“We decided to look at local grassroots groups that were dealing with cancer—not

just breast cancer, though obviously that was a really big part of it,” Nancy

says. “And also not just typical, middle-class white women’s activist groups

that it was easy for us, as white women, to identify.”

 

So the women set out to get acquainted with a broader range of organizations

working with women with cancer.

 

“We found cancer-specific organizations that weren’t targeted to specific ethnic

communities, like Breast Cancer Action and the Women’s Cancer Resource Center,”

Nancy says. “In the Latino community, there wasn’t a Latina cancer organization,

though there was a Latina women’s health initiative. There was a Vietnamese

health improvement project; it wasn’t women-specific. And there was a Native

American health group. There was a black women’s health initiative that served

women with cancer. We couldn’t find cancer-specific groups in all different

segments of the community, but we thought we could try to work with the groups

and see if they were interested.”

 

The organizations they pinpointed were ones that were often overlooked or

rejected by mainstream foundations, not only because of the political nature of

their work but also because of the less “marketable” nature of some of their

services.

 

Luz Alvarez Martinez, cofounder and executive director of the Oakland-based

National Latina Health Organization, recalls that some of the walk’s

beneficiaries (including her own organization) provided services that might have

been considered too mundane for a grant proposal, such as financial assistance

to clients for groceries and phone bills. “A lot of funders won’t fund that,”

Luz says, noting that the Women and Cancer Walk placed no restrictions on the

funds given to the agencies.

 

It was also important to the organizers that the beneficiaries be groups that

truly needed the funds. “We didn’t want to just raise money and give it to

people who could easily raise money, like universities or the American Cancer

Society,” Nancy recalls.

 

They settled on six beneficiaries for the first walk, more than doubling that

number within a few years.

Getting the Beneficiaries Involved

Beyond merely developing a list of prospective beneficiaries, the three original

organizers were committed to getting the agencies involved in the planning

process from the start.

 

“We didn’t want to be a group planning for them—we wanted them to be involved,”

Abby explains. Of course, the last thing many of the organizations’ already

overworked staff members needed was another evening meeting to

attend—particularly for an inaugural event, where the return on their investment

hadn’t yet proved worthwhile.

 

Susan Liroff, then executive director of the Berkeley-based Women’s Cancer

Resource Center, remembers when Nancy walked into the center to present the idea

of the walk. “She said that she wanted to make the time involvement as minimal

as possible,” Susan says. “At the time, I was so overloaded and inundated that I

probably believed it, because I didn’t have the time.” Still, she says, she was

thrilled with the idea and believed in the organizers’ vision.

 

The first meeting took place one evening in the fall of 1991 at Nancy’s

workplace. Representatives from all the agencies came, some of whom were meeting

each other for the first time. “It was a very good mix of women, committed women

from all different backgrounds,” Luz Alvarez Martinez remembers.

 

Of course, as any community organizer working in a coalition knows all too well,

it took time for some of the agency representatives to adjust to working with

each other— not to mention with Nancy, Abby, and Joanne, who were not affiliated

with an organization.

 

“There was plenty of confusion and struggle around how to work together without

using a hierarchical structure,” Joanne remembers. “I think we should have

devoted more time to establishing our working process before we plunged into

organizing.”

 

“The beneficiary organizations didn’t know who we were,” Nancy adds. “A lot of

the decisions took a while, because we had to build trust with people from

different cultures, and we communicated very differently.”

 

“There was a lot of learning, a lot of processing,” Abby says.

 

Yet there was an urgency to it all, because they had decided to try to simplify

the process of securing a site and a permit for the first walk by piggybacking

it onto a daylong event sponsored by the San Francisco Volunteer Center. They

were committed to a collective decision-making process, but they were also

committed to a May date—and there were a lot of decisions to be made.

 

“It was a constant balancing of process and task,” Nancy says.

A Community Experience

Despite the challenges of coalition work—not to mention a daunting task and

limited time—the women managed to secure funding to stage the premier walk and

encouraged prospective walkers to solicit pledges from family and friends. “We

really tried to stress that any amount was helpful,” Abby says. “There was no

minimum.”

 

That stands in marked contrast to today’s Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, which

requires walkers to raise $1,800 in order to participate, and the Komen 3-Day,

which requires a minimum of $2,000.

 

Maren Klawiter—a sociologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who is

presently finishing a book entitled Reshaping the Contours of Breast Cancer:

From Private Stigma to Public Actions—points out more differences between the

experience of the Women and Cancer Walk and that of the Susan G. Komen

Foundation’s San Francisco Race for the Cure, in a scholarly article published

in the journal Social Problems. Both events took place in the same meadow at

Golden Gate Park in 1996, she writes, but the differences were vast:

 

Neither balloons nor pink ribbons are in abundance [at the Women and Cancer

Walk]. There is no sign of pink visors. Like the Race, the Walk constructs and

celebrates a particular symbolic community. But the symbolic community

constructed by the Walk is quite different from that of the Race. The beauty,

fashion, and fitness industries are absent. So too, for the most part, is the

health care industry. Instead, the community is comprised of dozens of

volunteers, performers, speakers, walkers, and the thirteen beneficiary

organizations. The beneficiaries include three feminist cancer organizations and

six women’s health advocacy organizations—two Latina, two African American, one

Vietnamese, and one older women’s.…Like the Race, women, and white women in

particular, predominate at the Walk. Many of the women here, however, hail from

a different social location. Certainly, there are women here who would blend in

easily at the Race, but they are neither the most visible nor the majority.

At the Walk…though there are certainly active and athletic women in this crowd,

they do not set the standard. Soft bodies in comfortable shoes replace hard

bodies in exercise attire.

 

The Women and Cancer Walk took place each year from 1992 through 1996. Of all

the contingents in the Volunteer Center’s 1992 walk—the initial “test run”—the

Women and Cancer Walk’s was the largest, which gave the organizers the

confidence to strike out on their own the following year. They continued to

raise thousands of dollars for each of the beneficiary organizations in

subsequent years, reaching a high of $7,000 per organization ($115,000 total) in

1995.

 

But the walks were about much more than fund-raising. As Maren Klawiter

indicates, they provided a setting for women from, well, all walks of life to

experience a sense of community. They provided an emotional outlet for women

affected by cancer, featuring a remembrance grove of prayer flags, photographs,

and other handmade tributes to women with cancer. Each walk also honored living

Walkers of Courage (always women “singled out for their service and activism,”

Maren notes, “rather than for their survival”). They also provided an

opportunity to educate the public, in a politicized way, about the realities of

breast cancer.

 

Yet one of the most gratifying aspects of the experience seems to be the

personal connections that were established between leaders of the various

organizations. Susan Liroff remembers, for instance, becoming acquainted with

Luz Alvarez Martinez and the Native American Health Center’s director, Diane

Williams, through their involvement in the walk. The women ended up working

together on other projects, including a presentation in the library that housed

La Clinica de la Raza, a health center in East Oakland providing services to a

primarily low-income Latino clientele.

 

The connections established by the planning process for the walk ultimately

enriched the organizations’ work, Nancy points out. “It wasn’t an intended

result, but it was amazing.”

The Next Level

Unfortunately, despite such great rewards, the three original organizers were

all but burned out by 1996 by the demands of organizing the walks on top of

their full-time jobs and other commitments. They had rented a small office space

and hired a part-time administrative coordinator to ease the process, but that

wasn’t enough to sustain them.

 

“You get to a point where something has to change,” says Nancy, a veteran

community organizer who has seen this pattern reveal itself repeatedly in social

justice work. “After you’ve created something—you get it off the ground, you

make it work, you go through a few cycles—then you get to a point where you have

to say, OK, in order to continue this, it has to go to another level. Are the

circumstances such that this can happen? Are there people available who can take

it to the next level? Is the money available?”

 

Perhaps a bigger question, though, is what exactly the “next level” looks like.

The organizers agree that, in the case of the Women and Cancer Walk, taking it

to the next level could not have meant expanding and refocusing it to something

akin to the Komen and Avon walks. Joanne cites the desire to bring “a political

analysis about women’s cancers into a fund-raising walk,” which she notes that

walks like Komen’s and Avon’s do not do. Nancy and Abby point to their choice to

steer clear of corporate backing and high overhead.

 

“It was a downside not to have the big bucks,” Abby admits. But, Nancy adds, “we

didn’t want to accept funding that would help exonerate some sort of corporate

evil-doing or come with strings attached.”

 

Still, the organizers say, these conditions didn’t necessarily have to spell the

end of what they had initiated. “You can do responsible fund-raising and not

have obscene overhead,” Nancy says. “But maybe the need now isn’t doing a

fund-raiser.” Maybe, she says, the need is to build on the community spirit and

connections that were established in organizing the Women and Cancer Walk, and

to continue to build a network of support locally. “All of the organizations are

still around,” she points out. “There are still the seeds of that connection.”

 

Susan Liroff, no longer executive director of the Women’s Cancer Resource Center

but still a board member, echoes that hope. Even the WCRC’s annual Swim-a-Mile

fundraiser—very much a grassroots event run largely by volunteers, with funds

returned directly to the center—doesn’t, and isn’t designed to, replicate the

type of community-fair atmosphere that the Women and Cancer Walk had. “It’s a

single organization doing its own fund-raiser,” she says, adding that she would

love to see the Swim-a-Mile become an opportunity for a broad range of agencies

to connect with each other and with diverse communities.

 

In the meantime, as Komen and Avon compete for the largest piece of turf in an

ever-growing crowd of corporate breast cancer fund-raisers, the Women and Cancer

Walk’s organizers marvel at the community legend their brainstorm became and the

request, more than a decade later, to recount its founding. Speculating about

the nature of the event’s possible successors, Nancy reiterates that their

experience parallels that of any community organizer trying to effect social

change.

 

“No movement is a continuous thing—people stand on each other’s shoulders,” she

says. “The fact that [the Women and Cancer Walk] didn’t happen in 1997 was just

a statement that the people doing it at the time couldn’t continue doing it in

the same way. It doesn’t mean other people can’t step up and try and build on

that.”

 

 

 

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