Jesse Scheckner
A South Florida nonprofit dedicated to helping underserved women overcome financial and cultural barriers to life-saving cancer screenings and treatment is now two years ahead of its fundraising goal — thanks, in part, to the effort of a few state lawmakers.
The Promise Fund of Florida, based in Palm Beach, is on track to receive $450,000 in this year’s state budget to enhance its offerings, most notably patient navigation services that help to guide women through the Florida health care system.
The allocation is part of a record-setting $112 billion budget the Legislature approved last month.
Boynton Beach Democratic Sen. Lori Berman sponsored a request for the allocation (LFIR 1180) in the Senate with help from Ferdinand Beach Republican Sen. Aaron Bean. Boca Raton Democratic Rep. Kelly Skidmore sponsored its House counterpart (HB 2563) with co-sponsorship from Democratic Rep. Matt Willhite of Wellington.
For Berman, now six years removed from a successful bout with breast cancer, the issue is very personal.
“I was really lucky. I had great insurance and I had great navigators to help me through the process, and when the Promise Fund came to me and said, ‘Will you help us with this project?’ I was so excited to jump onboard to make sure other people can get the same kind of health care I was able to take advantage of,” she said.
“It is shocking when you get a breast cancer diagnosis. You really do need someone to help you through the process and to the end result of hopefully having a cancer-free future.”
The funding set-aside, if approved by Gov. Ron DeSantis, will increase access to care for underserved women with or at risk of cervical and breast cancer. Most of the money will go toward adding staff to the Promise Fund Navigator Program, which provides individualized assistance to women through the screening, diagnosis, treatment and completion of care processes.
Early detection is vital in treating breast and cervical cancer. Survival rates of such cancers, if caught in early stages, are nearly 99% for breast cancer and 92% for cervical cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.
To that end, the focus of the Navigator Program is to aid low-income women, particularly uninsured or underinsured women of color.
Black women have the highest rate of death from cervical cancer in the United States and are more than one-and-a-half times more likely to die of the disease than White women, according to a joint study by the Human Rights Watch and Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative for Economic and Social Justice.
Hispanic women are also more likely to develop cervical cancer and are diagnosed with more late-stage breast cancer compared to their Caucasian counterparts, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found.
The Promise Fund, which to date has educated, screened or treated more than 16,000 women in Palm Beach County, is specifically looking to expand its services in rural areas there like the Glades in order to flatten those disproportions.
“We honestly have 80,000 women who have no medical home, no relationship with a physician, and we don’t know how long since many of them have seen a doctor,” said Susan G. Komen founder Nancy Brinker, who co-founded the Promise Fund with Julie Fisher Cummings and Laurie Silvers.
Florida’s health system is among the worst in the nation, ranking 41st among all U.S. states and the District of Columbia due to poor access, affordability, prevention and treatment, a 2020 Commonwealth Fund analysis determined.
Brinker said she launched the Promise Fund after reading a study that found Florida had the highest number of women under 65 without insurance nationwide.
“This isn’t right. This isn’t fair. It’s health inequity at its worst,” she said. “So, I gathered two of my best friends, Julie Cummings and Laurie Silvers, and we sat down and said, ‘What are we going to do about this?’”
The plan, she continued, is to keep the Promise Fund local but to operate it in such a way that its programming can successfully be applied elsewhere.
“We’re not going to be a national charity,” she said. “We’re going to be a model which can be replicated and, in order to use our name, (the model will be) licensed to (others while) making sure the formula is followed.
“Anyone who might want to become a Promise Fund, whether in Florida or another state — they will be asked to live and serve by a set of principles we have adopted.”
Brinker said the Promise Fund raised $5.5 million, all of which will go to its efforts in Palm Beach County. In addition to hiring more patient navigators, the organization plans to use the funds to support enhancements to patient outreach efforts, improvements in patient education, data analysis, dedicated cervical screenings, general programming and assistance with replicating its model.
“The state of Florida is always really looking for results. We want to see proven partners that have a resource and network that can reach out to other patients we otherwise wouldn’t discover or know about, and that’s what the Promise Fund brings — a network of expertise, of people who know what they’re doing, and then a network that will be able to reach underserved communities that need help,” said Bean, for whom the 2022 Legislative Session was his last. “Hopefully, that can serve as a model for other areas of the state.”
