Nancy Brinker Leadership Change Probably Won't Do Much To Improve Komen's Reputation [Disgrace For The Cure]

Fallout continues from the Susan B. Komen Foundation for the Cure's major PR fuckup six months ago, when it was announced that the organization would be cutting funds for breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood. The decision, rescinded within three days after the public outcry, was criticized for its possible right-wing political influence (and, in fact, led to the almost-immediate February resignation of former Komen VP and policymaker Karen Handel, a 2010 Georgia GOP candidate who had campaigned against Planned Parenthood during her run and was supposedly the driving force behind the decision).

They've been scrambling to regain the trust of individual donors, whose contribution fell from 5% to 30% nationwide, and are now defending the most recent development in Komen's recovery: Nancy Brinker's resignation from her post as CEO of Komen (she'll be heading up a more fundraising-focused role), as well as the departure of president Liz Thompson and two board members. Despite the clamoring from critics that Brinker step down, a spokeswoman says that the decision was unrelated to the Planned Parenthood snafu and Thompson had informed Komen officials that she wanted to leave in April but would stay on to do damage control.

However, breast cancer activists and former Komen employees have spoken out about the bureaucratic motives behind the decision to shift Brinker to "revenue creation" and leave the hiring of a new CEO in her hands. The Planned Parenthood incident was hardly the first that raised questions of Komen's level of commitment to the cause, just the loudest. Under Brinker's reign, the organization was accused of "pink marketing," wanton ribbon-branding by the organization without the efforts to back it up. One of the trickledown effects of this is less money donated to other valuable breast cancer organizations, according to Brenda Coffee, a breast cancer survivor and filmmaker at Breastcancersisterhood.org. Coffee further speculates that Brinker will still be "pulling the strings" from her new position.

And Eve Ellis, a Komen New York board member from 2004 to 2010, says:

That makes me think this is a public relations stunt. [Brinker] will be in a position to fire and hire and politicize women's health care. I understand that she will no longer be chief executive officer. But she will be the decision maker on who the C.E.O. is. This is problematic.

There's no word yet on who Brinker will be appointing, but Lisa Wolter, a Komen executive director in California who counts herself among the affiliate directors who voiced their concerned about the Planned Parenthood decision, seems determined to find the silver lining in all this. It sounds eerily familiar to Brinker's cheerful, oblivious press releases: "In a lot of ways, this whole spotlight on what we do has motivated people who care about breast health."

Um. OTAY.

'Komen's Leadership Changes Are Met With Skepticism' [The New York Times]

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Komen President Steps Down to Focus on Making More Money [Disgrace For The Cure]

Nancy Brinker, founder, President, and CEO of Susan G. Komen for the Cure (which I'm now required to characterize as "embattled") announced yesterday that after years at the helm of the breast cancer charity, she'd be stepping down from her role to focus more on "revenue creation." Two other board members resigned on the same day, and it's not clear who will replace Brinker as she works to convince more people to give her money for the cure.

The charity's had a disastrous year — at the very end of January, Komen announced that it would be cutting off its grants to Planned Parenthood, angering women's groups, politicians, and fueling a long-whispered theory that the organization cared more about its own image than it did about actual women's health. And in the days after the announcement, it was discovered that, thanks to some highly-placed Komen officials with ideologically extreme agendas, the grant cutoff wasn't procedural, but political. The charity couldn't get its story straight — it first claimed that Planned Parenthood grants had been discontinued because the family planning organization was under Congressional investigation, but when several people pointed out that Planned Parenthood gave money to plenty of organizations and institutions that were under investigation, Nancy Brinker took it upon herself to defend Komen's actions in a series of media appearances that only made her look like Lady Who Lunched who didn't need to fully explain herself to the millions of American women who didn't want to see women's health further politicized.

Planned Parenthood's funds were eventually restored by the charity, but not before several curiously political Komen stances and questionable practices were brought to light — why had the charity supported embryonic stem cell research in 2006, and disavowed it in 2011? Why did Nancy Brinker, wealthy thanks to a profitable divorce, still earn almost half a million dollars a year and live a lavish, charity-funded lifestyle? How beholden to right-wing political pressure was the organization? And why the hell were they partnering with the dictator of Uzbekistan's socialite pop singer daughter, whose fashion line uses child slave labor? And why did the perfume the charity sold contain carcinogens? And why did the organization refuse to condemn cancer-causing chemicals used by companies that gave them lots of money? And why did they spend so much time suing other, smaller charities?

Komen officials hoped its Hell Fortnight would end when former Georgia gubernatorial candidate and once and always anti-abortion zealot Karen Handel resigned her executive post at the charity, but public trust was already shaken and in the ensuing months, Komen's fundraising suffered and never recovered. The charity's signature fundraising event, Race for the Cure, lagged in nearly every market. Galas were canceled. Officials in chapters across the country resigned in disappointment. Many critics called for Nancy Brinker to resign if she valued the future of the charity, but there she was, hanging on.

Until yesterday.

What pushed Brinker over the edge and prompted her to hand the mess off to another, yet-to-be-named candidate wasn't specified by Brinker's sunny press release about the shake up ("I want to focus on Susan G. Komen's global mission and raising resources to bring our promise to women all around the world."), but I'd venture a guess it had something to do with vocal criticism from the scientific community of Komen's deceptive practices. In a piece published in the British Medical Journal last week, the directors of the Center for Medicine and the Media at Dartmouth Medical School wrote that Komen was flat-out lying to women about the benefits of mammograms (well, the paper used the words "misleading" and "false," which is a less confrontational way to say "lying"). According to Komen literature, 98% of women who detect breast cancer early survive versus the 23% who survive without early detection. One of the authors of the study told Bloomberg,

We think Komen can do a lot better by giving women the information they need to weigh the benefits and the harms. They aren't doing a good job. The ads are misleading and give false promises.

Ouch.

In addition to Brinker's resignation, two other members of the Board stepped down yesterday.

This debacle will one day make a great lesson in How Not to Handle a PR Snafu; even with Brinker's resignation, it may be too late for Komen to restore the cloying pink sheen to its reputation, though, as the damage has been done.

[LAT]

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