Pitching in: Four-time breast cancer survivor helps ease the financial burden of treatment

The organizer: Donna Sheehan

The pitch: Launching the Breast Cancer Support Fund

Shortly after Donna Sheehan was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003, she began working with an organization that supported breast cancer patients and quickly noticed the financial hardship many women encountered.

“I realized that the most stressful part of their diagnosis was not the treatment, but the financial crisis,” she recalled.

That led her to create the Breast Cancer Support Fund, or BCSF, a Toronto-based charity that provides financial assistance to women undergoing cancer treatment. The fund also works with partners in Ontario and parts of Atlantic Canada to offer a meal support program.

The fund receives referrals from social workers at cancer centres. Around 40 per cent of the patients it helps are single parents, many earning less than $25,000 annually. “We are looking for people who really don’t have resources to pay for basic necessities like food and shelter, utilities, medications, parking,” she said. The charity provides one-time payments of up to $2,000.

Since it started in 2011, the fund has helped around 700 women across Canada and provided $1-million in assistance.

The BCSF relies on foundations and individual donations to cover its $280,000 annual budget. It’s launching a $25,000 fundraising campaign called Move for the Boob to encourage people to get active in their community and raise money for the fund.

Ms. Sheehan can still remember the first cancer patient the fund assisted; a 42-year-old woman in Oshawa, Ont. “She had absolutely no money and her new husband wasn’t supporting her,” she said.

Most of the women the fund helps are less than 50 and it has provided assistance to some in their 20s. Many were barely making ends meet before their diagnosis. “And sometimes cancer treatment can be more than a year if there’s reconstruction involved. So it’s a lot to take on.”

Ms. Sheehan, 72, has been diagnosed with breast cancer four times – in 2003, 2018, 2019 and 2020. Each time the cancer was caught early and she is doing well.

She has been asked whether her work on the charity gets depressing. “I said, ‘no, I’m inspired and I just feel honoured to be able to help people that truly need it’.”