Susan G. Komen

Contents

1. A sister and a promise
2. The organization and its names
3. What the organization does now
4. Komen in Nebraska

Among the Omaha causes Brent O’Mara supports are Susan G. Komen, the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, PlaySmart and Angels Among Us, and the name at the head of that list raises a plain question before any other. The question a reader brings is who Susan G. Komen was. The answer is that she was a woman from Peoria, Illinois, who died of breast cancer in 1980 at the age of 36, and that the organization carrying her name was founded by her sister two years later to keep a promise made at her bedside.⁵ Everything else about the organization, its races, its ribbon, its research grants and its Nebraska community, follows from that.

A sister and a promise

The National Women’s History Museum supplies the biography. Susan Goodman Komen was born on October 31, 1942, in Peoria, attended the University of Missouri to study art history, returned home to work as a model, married and adopted two children.⁵ In 1977, at 33, a biopsy confirmed breast cancer. The museum notes that at the time women in her position received little social support, that the disease was rarely discussed outside medicine, and that treatment was often limited to a radical mastectomy; she refused one, agreed to a partial removal of the tissue, and when the cancer spread went through further surgeries, radiation and chemotherapy over three years.⁵ Throughout, her sister recalls, she was troubled by how little information and how few options existed, and asked her sister to do something about it once she was better.⁵ She died in 1980.

A 2010 profile of her sister, Nancy Brinker, published ahead of a keynote address, describes the climate the founder faced in 1982: newspapers balked at printing the words breast cancer, no one talked openly about the disease, there were no toll free numbers, no internet and few support groups.⁶ Brinker, who later served as the United States ambassador to Hungary from 2001 to 2003 and as chief of protocol from 2007 to 2009, founded the organization in 1982 and in 1983 started the first Race for the Cure in Dallas with 800 participants; by 2010 the series ran 112 races with more than a million participants.⁶

Figure

From a diagnosis to a name

1. 01
   1942Susan Goodman is born in Peoria, Illinois, on October 31
2. 02
   1977At 33 a biopsy confirms breast cancer; she declines a mastectomy and treatment continues for three years
3. 03
   1980She dies at 36 after asking her sister to find a way to speed up research
4. 04
   1982Nancy Brinker founds the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation
5. 05
   2009 to 2014Brinker serves as the organization's president and chief executive
6. 06
   2023The organization is renamed simply Susan G. Komen

The organization and its names

The organization has had three names. It began as the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. In January 2007, The New York Times reported, it marked its twenty fifth anniversary by rebranding as Susan G. Komen for the Cure, spending more than one million dollars on a campaign built around the fact that the public knew it best through its fundraising events, and replacing a silhouette logo with a stylized pink ribbon and the phrase that it was on a mission.⁴ The campaign, run with three advertising agencies, replaced the gentle imagery of earlier years with blunt copy about what the organization intended to do to the disease, sold promise rings in pairs at five dollars to represent the promise between the two sisters, and was explained by its marketing director as a way to reach younger and more diverse audiences that the foundation felt it had not been serving.⁴ The Times treated it as an example of how nonprofits were borrowing the methods of consumer marketers to reach restless donors.⁴ In 2023 the organization was renamed again, simply Susan G. Komen.⁵

The museum biography places the organization in a longer history and does not flatter it. It notes that the modern breast cancer movement has roots in the women’s health activism of the 1970s, that the pink ribbon began with a cancer patient who did not want the symbol commercialized, and that other advocacy groups have criticized the organization’s marketing as pinkwashing.⁵ It also records what the organization became: a household name through the 1990s and 2000s, with billions of donor dollars invested in research, advocacy and awareness, and a network of groups that continue to raise money and build community toward the goal of ending the disease.⁵ Brinker herself was the organization’s president and chief executive from 2009 to 2014, and the 2010 profile credits her with pioneering cause related marketing, the arrangement by which businesses tie a product to a charity’s work.⁶

What the organization does now

The organization’s Nebraska page states its mission as saving lives by meeting the most critical needs of communities and investing in research to prevent and cure breast cancer, and reports that it has invested 1.1 billion dollars in breast cancer research since 1982.¹ Its awareness month page explains that the country has recognized October as National Breast Cancer Awareness Month for nearly four decades, that one in eight women will be diagnosed in her lifetime, that nearly 44,000 people in the United States were expected to die of the disease in 2022, and that the organization’s own guidance for women at average risk is a yearly mammogram from age 40.²

Figure

Komen in Nebraska

Nebraska counties served by its breast cancer services

93

people in Nebraska who seek help and information from it every week

728

people in Nebraska who advocate through it for breast cancer patients

199

The practical side is a patient care center and a financial assistance program. The organization’s guide to financial help explains that the cost of care arrives as many separate bills, that out of pocket costs such as transportation add to the burden, and that its own program offers limited financial assistance, education, psychosocial support and local referrals to eligible people in treatment at any stage or living with metastatic disease.³ The same guide lists the things that assistance can cover, including some medications, medical equipment, transportation to appointments, food and child care during treatment, and directs patients to hospital financial counselors, government programs and dozens of other charities for the rest.³ The guide also records the policy background: since September 2010 the Affordable Care Act has required new health plans to cover screening mammograms every one to two years for women from age 40 with no out of pocket cost, and a federal early detection program provides screening and diagnostic testing to uninsured and underinsured women between 40 and 64.³

Komen in Nebraska

The organization works through state communities rather than independent chapters, and the Nebraska community shares an executive with Iowa. Its page reports that 728 people in Nebraska seek help and information from it every week, that its breast cancer services reach all 93 counties, and that 199 people in the state advocate for breast cancer patients through it.¹ Local events range from a pickleball tournament at an Omaha venue, with prizes for the best pink outfits, to employee engagement programs through which a company can run a workplace health campaign with the organization’s materials, and the volunteer roles it lists include serving as a local brand ambassador, raising funds for its programs and staffing its signature walks and educational conferences.¹ A helpline run from its patient care center is the route it offers for finding local screening, clinical trials and financial assistance.¹

The signature event in the Omaha area is the More Than Pink Walk. WOWT reported that in October 2025 more than 2,200 people walked one or three miles around the ballpark in Papillion, among them 350 breast cancer survivors, and that the day raised more than 450,000 dollars for research, treatment and education.⁷ The walkers the station interviewed described the event as a show of support for family members and church members who had survived the disease or died of it, which is the form the organization’s work takes in a mid sized city: a walk, a fundraising total and a crowd that knows exactly what one in eight means.⁷

Figure

The Papillion walk, October 2025

walkers on a one or three mile route around the ballpark

2,200

breast cancer survivors among them

350

raised for research, treatment and education

450,000 dollars

The organization sits beside Angels Among Us and the American Heart Association among the health charities that draw Omaha’s giving, a pattern described under philanthropy in Omaha.

Komen is a national organization with a state community, founded in Dallas and run from there, and what it has in Nebraska is a page, a director shared with the neighboring state, a walk and the people who turn out for it. The institutions that belong to Omaha itself, the ones founded in the city and answerable to it, are a different kind of thing, and they are the subject of the next entry, Omaha’s civic institutions.