Michael Kraft
Who doesn’t love an origin story, especially when that story takes shape to become a great community organization?
Nearly 30 years ago, physician Julie Ohnemus faced down breast cancer. She underwent a mastectomy and her surgeon, Dr. Ellen Mahoney, referred Dr. Ohnemus to the Community Breast Health Project in Palo Alto. There, Dr. Ohnemus found help and resources she hadn’t heard about previously. She reports “feeling held by the women, thorough their supportive knowing.” This led to conversations on how to bring services like these to the Humboldt Area and, not long after, those discussions gave birth to what we now know as the Breast and Gyn Health Project (BGHP).
Executive Director Rose Gale-Zoellick says that, in Humboldt and Del Norte counties, approximately 100 people a year get a breast cancer diagnosis and another 40 receive some sort of gynecological cancer diagnosis. In 2024, the BGHP served 382 people with an average of over 20 contacts per person (clients often engage with the organization over multiple years).
Rose describes each cancer-affected person’s experience as unique, and the Project provides supports that are tailored to that individual. Services often start with a client’s initial diagnosis and can stretch well into survivorship. The organization helps in many ways, including with facilitating support groups, supplying wigs and prosthetics, maintaining an informative website and providing a very practical binder to help clients navigate the health care system and their cancer journey. With either a nurse or a doctor on staff, there is also high-quality patient education available.
And this is key: all services are free to the client.
Funding for the BHGP comes in an approximately 80/20 split between community giving and private foundation grants. Thankfully, given the current environment, the organization doesn’t rely heavily on government funding. It happens that June features one of the biggest fundraising efforts of the Project, their yearly raffle. Prizes include several vacations so that, in addition to doing good, you can have a shot at a week in Vermont or New Mexico. Citizens seeking to donate, or hoping to fly off to Santa Fe, can go to www.bhgp.org to get started.
The Breast and Gyn Health Project makes extensive use of volunteers. One group is the “warmliners,” who staff phone-based support. Often, a cancer patient’s most consistent
person in the long road from diagnosis to triumphing as a survivor is one of these volunteers. You can investigate how to become one of these champions on the website.
Several people among my family and friends have had cancer, including breast and gynecological cancers. I have seen up close that, when you get that word that you are a cancer person, it’s a stiff punch in the gut. It’s overwhelming. It’s my contention that having a guide, what I think of as a cancer sherpa, can be as important as finding a good diagnostician or a skilled surgeon. So, despite not being a medical provider, as narrowly defined, the Breast and Gyn Health Project serves in a linchpin role to help move people from cancer patients to cancer survivors.
As the Breast and Gyn Health Project approaches its 30-year anniversary, Rose hopes that what began with a group of pioneering women around a physician/patient’s kitchen table continues as far into the future as breast and gynecological cancers do. “It’s a special organization, with a special place in the community.”
Here’s hoping that you or someone you love never need them but, if you do, here’s hoping even more that the good folks at the Breast and Gyn Helath Project can be there for you and your loved ones when that time comes.
Good Work is a series written by Michael Kraft, who volunteers on behalf of the Northern California Association of Nonprofits (NorCAN). NorCAN supports connections between people and organizations that work every day to keep our communities healthy and strong by offering professional development, board support, networking connections and more. Learn more at https://norcal-nonprofits.org/. To nominate a deserving nonprofit organization to be profiled, email michael@kraftconsultants.com.
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