The Women's Breast & Heart Initiative

The Women's Breast & Heart Initiative is a community-based outreach organization dedicated to educating women and college students about the importance of breast and heart health while providing them with the resources to beat the odds breast cancer and heart disease. Our focus is disease prevention and early detection to impact present and future generations. Our interventions are a platform for collaboration, civic engagement, and social change. We believe that if you change the life of a woman, you change the life of a family, if you change the lives of families, you change lives in the community and empower the broader community to live healthier, happier and more productive lives.

WBHI's core program utilizes an innovative, evidence-based street level approach which engages the community at-large to address disparities and brings preventive screening and risk reduction strategies into targeted neighborhoods. An ongoing preventive screening and referral program (PSP) compliments the strategy to ensure that more women access a continuum prevention and early detection. In 2016, a peer led college campus club program was launched to provide disease prevention and health promotion on campuses to foster leadership and to impact the health of future generations. Our programs were developed, field tested and perfected in Miami-Dade County, Florida and subsequently expanded to Broward and Palm Beach counties.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, service delivery was reimagined, and two innovative programs emerged. The Virtual Advocate Program (VAP) fosters health literacy in college students and utilizes social media as a tool for civic engagement, and the Workplace Wellness Program (WWP) which breaks down barriers that prohibit low-income women from participating in disease prevention and early detection, by serving them where they work.

Our goal is to reduce disparities and change the trajectory of health through disease prevention & early detection.