Interdisciplinary Breast Cancer SPORE Community Outreach and Engagement

The P20 and planned SPORE focus on identifying emerging cancer issues in underserved communities and providing evidence-based interventions that maximize the impact of our resources. We partner with the Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Office of Community Engagement and Cancer Health Equity to create bidirectional collaborations with community partners. Some examples include:

• Academic institutions, community health organizations, and Susan G. Komen launched the Chicago Health Equity Initiative (CHEI) in 2019 with the goals of decreasing breast cancer mortality disparities across Chicagoland, increasing adherence and compliance of prevention, risk reduction and treatment options for breast cancer, and addressing socio-economic barriers to care and health system fragmentation across the continuum of care. SPORE investigators, Drs. Olopade, Huo, and Sheth, actively participate in this initiative and serve on the CHEI executive committee. 
• Dr. Sheth has been working closely with community stakeholders, including Susan G. Komen, Sisters Working It Out, Equal Hope, and Chicago Family Health. Not only is she actively involved in community outreach and education on breast cancer screening, but she has also collaborated with these community stakeholders to address health equity and breast cancer screening issues. 
• Dr. Nanda recently joined the Board of Trustees of the Triple-Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) Foundation. In this role, she will be involved in providing scientific guidance to help The Foundation achieve its mission to provide resources for those living with TNBC, as well as being a catalyst for stimulating scientific advances for the treatment of this deadly disease.
• Dr. Nanda is involved in patient outreach by giving webinars and in-person talks at local and national advocacy meetings. She has partnered with the Susan G. Komen, the Metastatic Breast Cancer Network, the Young Survival Coalition, and Living Beyond Breast Cancer to provide informational lectures to survivors and their caregivers on the current status of TNBC, from treatment options to ongoing research.