Komen Houston Affiliate Pledges $687,750 to The Rose

The Rose Board Chair Myrleen Knott (left)
and CEO and Co-Founder Dorothy Gibbons
at the Komen Houston Affiliate awards luncheon.

Their relationship, which is dedicated to reducing deaths from breast cancer, goes back 18 years. That’s when the Houston Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure® donated its first gift to The Rose – $9,000.

The two nonprofit organizations will fight this disease again this year with a pledge of $687,750 from the Komen Houston Affiliate to The Rose, a 24-year-old nonprofit breast cancer organization that last year delivered more than 68,000 medical and educational services to both uninsured and insured Houston-area women.

In addition, the Komen Houston Affiliate has recognized The Rose with the 2010 Impact Award for Overall Outstanding Performance.

The $687,750 donation will help fund the Empower Her® Sponsorship Program that provides services to more than 7,000 uninsured women. The services include mammograms, ultrasounds, biopsies and access to treatment. The gift will cover many expenses needed to operate the Patient Navigation Program that assists more than 200 women a month who are in treatment.

“The Rose and the Komen Houston Affiliate have a long history of caring for Houston women,” said Dorothy Weston Gibbons, Co-founder and CEO of The Rose. “We are deeply grateful for their trust and belief in what we do. We are honored that every step of the way, the Komen Houston Affiliate has supported us.”

Gibbons said the Houston area has the highest uninsured rate in the United States. “Nearly one in three people don’t have medical coverage, and there are so few programs available for the working poor who make up half of the uninsured population.

The Rose operates two mammography centers, The Rose Southeast in south Houston and the new Rose Galleria on West Loop South. The centers are staffed by more than 90 employees including four on-site physicians – two radiologists and two general surgeons. Two mobile mammography units serve the surrounding 9-county area.

For more information about The Rose, call (713) 668-2996, or visit http://www.therose.org/, and The Rose Facebook page.

For more information about the Komen Houston Affiliate, call 713-783-9188, or visit http://www.komen-houston.org/.