Breast Cancer Action
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| Non-profit | |
| Founded | 1990 |
| Founder | Elenore Pred, Susan Claymon, Belle Shayer |
| Headquarters | 657 Mission St. Suite 302 San Francisco, CA 94105 |
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Key people
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Karuna R. Jaggar (Executive Director) |
| Website | bcaction.org |
Breast Cancer Action (BCAction) is a U.S.-based grassroots education and activist organization driven by and supporting people living with breast cancer. It was founded in 1990 by Elenore Pred, Susan Claymon, and Linda Reyes. Based in San Francisco, BCAction is known for understanding breast cancer not as an individual crisis, but a public health emergency, and for their commitment to social justice. The organization's mission is to achieve health justice for all women at risk of and living with breast cancer. BCAction is known for its Think Before You Pink campaign, launched in 2002, which encourages consumers to ask critical questions before buying pink ribbon products and holds corporations accountable for pinkwashing.
In 1990, a group of women living with breast cancer in the San Francisco Bay Area were seeking information about the causes and treatment of their disease. They encountered unresponsive government agencies and private organizations that provided inadequate, superficial information—not the evidence-based data they were looking for. They got angry and turned that anger into action by forming Breast Cancer Action.
The first meeting was held in founder Elenore Pred’s living room. “We are meeting to organize Breast Cancer Action,” the flyer for the meeting announced. “Our goals are education and political action to prevent a further rise in breast cancer.” One of the group’s first acts was a meeting with the director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to demand that the agency address the breast cancer epidemic. Founding members Elenore Pred, Susan Claymon, Belle Shayer, and Linda Reyes attended this meeting along with other breast cancer activists. Later, following the death of Elenore Pred, Susan Claymon became the first breast cancer activist to address the President’s Cancer Panel in Washington, D.C. The actions of these founding women framed breast cancer not as an individual problem but as a public health crisis requiring systemic solutions, with an emphasis on empowering women living with and at risk of the disease.
In 1995 Barbara Brenner became the organization's first executive director, a position she held until 2010 when she retired due to non-breast cancer-related health issues. She was significant in increasing the organization's membership from 3,500 to more than 15,000, and increasing its emphasis on environmental issues and social critiques of the use of breast cancer activism.
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