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Mill Valley's Lis Fuchs to Speak May 8th at Zero Breast Cancer Honor Thy Healer Dinner

15th Annual Honor Thy Healer Awardees Announced

Awards Ceremony: May 8, 2014 at Mill Valley Community Center

Local leader Lis Fuchs to speak.

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(San Rafael, Calif.) – Zero Breast Cancer, a community based non-profit organization in Marin County, CA, will present five awards to heroic individuals and organizations that have been effective, compassionate and proactive in addressing breast cancer. Honorees have contributed in diverse ways including to greater understanding of breast cancer, to the healing process of women facing breast cancer, and to the greater health of the broader community.


Awards will be presented at the 15th Annual Honor Thy Healer awards dinner on Thursday, May 8, 2014, at the Mill Valley Community Center, 180 Camino Alto in Mill Valley, California. For tickets to the Honor Thy Healer awards dinner go to http://hth.zerobreastcancer.org or call (415) 507-1949 x 105. Proceeds benefit Zero Breast Cancer’s community-based research, outreach and education programs.

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Local community leader and breast cancer patient Lis Fuchs will speak at the Thursday, May 8th event to "honor her healer", who will be the Zero Breast Cancer event's keynote speaker and honorary chair, Dr. Pamela Munster, MD.

Lis Fuchs grew up in Marin, attending Bolinas School and Tamalpais High School. She returned to Mill Valley in 1993 with her husband to raise their three sons. She has been a dynamic community leader as the former board chair of Kiddo!, board member of the Tam High Foundation, the Tiburon Peninsula Little League Board and other community activities. She has been an accomplished business woman as Managing Director of Mill Valley based business consulting firm, Venture Pay Group Consulting, LLC.

Since she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002, Lis has been a powerhouse educator and fundraiser. She was on NBC national news for her work on Search for the Cause, and was a Stepping Out model for To Celebrate Life Breast Cancer Foundation.  When she was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer in 2011 it did not slow her down.  She was the featured survivor speaker at the 2012 SF Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.  She has participated in four Avon Walks and last year captained the #2 fundraising team, Team 4ever, raising over $68,000. To date she and her teams have raised nearly $140,000. Despite her progressing disease, this year she hopes to raise $100,000 for the SF Avon Walk, an event for which Marin based nonprofit Zero Breast Cancer has been a beneficiary.

This year’s honorees are:

·      Vida Campbell, MD, Radiologist and Medical Director of the Breast Diagnostic Center of Marin at Marin General Hospital.

·      Dan Trinidad, CEO and Joe Cucchiara, Branch Manager of Partners Mortgage in Roseville and San Jose

·      CYGNET Study Youth Advisory Board : Alexandra Anderson, MPH, Community Outreach & Translation Core Coordinator, Zero Breast Cancer, Diana Ha, BS, Senior Research Assistant, Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, Northern California and Amanda Paez, BS, Research Assistant at Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, Northern California and the  CYGNET Youth Advisory Board members.

·      Marla Anderson, MD and the Breast Center Steering Committee at the Kaiser Permanente San Rafael Medical Center

·      PulpWorks, Inc. of San Rafael, CA

·      Details of awardee achievements next page

 

The Honorary Chair and Keynote Speaker is Pamela Munster, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.                        

More detail about why the honorees were selected from among the candidates in this competitive process:

·      The 2014 Healing Professional is Vida Campbell, MD, the Medical Director of the Breast Diagnostic Center of Marin at Marin General Hospital (MGH). Dr. Campbell was instrumental in development of the Breast MRI program at the Breast Health Center.  She championed the establishment of a high risk breast screening program and continues to play an important role in the Breast Navigation Service Program at MGH.  Dr. Campbell is being recognized for her professional commitment and her “sincere, caring, patient and compassionate care of women diagnosed with breast cancer”, according to BJ (Betty Jean) Moehnke, a patient who nominated her for the award.

 

  • The 2014 Healing Partners are Dan Trinidad, CEO and Joe Cucchiara, Branch Manager of Partners Mortgage in Roseville and San Jose.  They were nominated by Leticia Croft-Holguin who, at 28, was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer during her ninth month of pregnancy. With their extensive personal and project support, Ms. Croft-Holguin not only successfully completed treatment, but also established the program Young Women and Breast Cancer at Latinas Contra Cancer, developed a resource website YMoms.org and authored a children’s book called C is for Cancer. Mr. Trinidad and Mr. Cucchiara provide an exemplary model of how businesses can provide a broad range of support to employees diagnosed with breast cancer.

 

·      The 2014 Community Breast Cancer Research honorees are the members of the CYGNET Youth Advisory Board (YAB) represented by the coordinators, Amanda E. Páez, Research Assistant and Diana Ha, Senior Research Assistant at Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, and Alexandra N. Anderson, Community Outreach & Translation Core Coordinator at Zero Breast Cancer. CYGNET is the epidemiology project, “Cohort Study of Young Girls’ Nutrition, Environment, and Transitions.” The YAB was created to provide girls in the study the opportunity to offer feedback on study materials and activities to study staff, and to teach the girls how advocacy can benefit the research process. 

 

  • The 2014 Hal Brown Shining Star award will be presented to Marla Anderson, MD and the Breast Center Steering Committee at the Kaiser Permanente San Rafael Medical Center. Dr. Anderson and the BCC Team worked diligently for the BCC to earn accreditation from the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers, ensuring that Kaiser San Rafael patients have access to high quality comprehensive care as well as information about clinical trials and new treatment options, using a unique multidisciplinary approach to diagnosis and treatment.

 

·      The 2014 Francine Levien Activist honoree is PulpWorks, Inc. of San Rafael, CA, for creating a safe, easy-to-open and environmentally friendly alternative to the plastic (PVC) blister pack: the PW-Pack. It is made of 100% recycled pulp and paper and is compostable. By eliminating PVC packaging, PulpWorks hopes to prevent more than half a million pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere and tons of plastic from going to landfills, thereby preventing the release of compounds such as dioxin, phthalates ,heavy metals, nonylphenols and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons  that have been  implicated in breast cancer incidence due to their carcinogenic and endocrine-disrupting potential.

 

About Zero Breast Cancer

Zero Breast Cancer is a non-profit organization, based in the Marin County (SF Bay Area), dedicated to prevention and finding the causes of breast cancer through community participation in the research process.  We focus on identifying environmental factors and the role they play in breast cancer at all stages of life and across generations. (www.zerobreastcancer.org)

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