The colour of hope

Anyone who thinks fashion folk are removed from real life doesn't know about Ralph Lauren's Pink Pony campaign

Anyone who thinks fashion folk are removed from real life doesn't know about Ralph Lauren's Pink Pony campaign, which is dispelling myths about breast cancer and improving patient outcomes in remote parts of Australia

While making a short film last year about Pink Pony’s support for women with breast cancer, PR professional Lisa Poulos never imagined the focus would soon be on her. “How ironic is that?” asks Poulos, who was diagnosed with four breast tumours last October, and underwent a bilateral radical mastectomy, followed by many months of chemotherapy.

“Having gone through this, you know what women need and that’s a support system around you,” Poulos explains. “It’s one of the hardest things for a woman to get through from a psychological point of view because you don’t know where it’s going. Breast cancer spreads more easily and quickly than any other cancer.”

The Pink Pony Campaign, launched overseas in 2000 and in Australia in 2002, is American designer Ralph Lauren’s personal initiative to improve access to cancer screening and treatment in under-serviced communities. As a Sydneysider, Poulos was lucky. She knew where to seek advice on choosing a breast surgeon and had great support from family and friends. But in regional areas, nurses may not know enough about breast cancer to co-ordinate care and provide information and support – and that’s where the training Pink Pony provides is invaluable.

In the past six years, Pink Pony scholarships have been awarded to 180 nurses and community health workers in rural and regional Australia. Since 2004, seeding grants have been awarded to 20 community-based organisations to kick-start programs that support women with breast cancer in their local communities. “They are really far and wide and each one has tapped into a very palpable need in the community,” says Helen Zorbas, director of the National Breast and Ovarian Cancer Centre, which administers the Pink Pony Campaign.

“One in three women who are diagnosed with breast cancer are likely to live within the rural community, so they face challenges such as travelling for treatment and being away from family and social networks,” Zorbas points out. “In the city there are numerous support groups and information sessions. Access to these is limited the further you are into rural and remote Australia. One of the issues is being able to ensure that those women have access to the latest information and feel engaged in a support group or network.”

New Yorker Ralph Lauren has been a breast cancer crusader since his good friend Nina Hyde, the influential fashion editor at The Washington Post who helped launch his career, died of breast cancer in 1990. In 1994 he inspired the Council of Fashion Designers of America to establish Fashion Targets Breast Cancer. This celebrity T-shirt campaign has since raised more than $US30 million ($34.5 million). And in 2003 he extended his philanthropic efforts and created the Ralph Lauren Centre for Cancer Care and Prevention in Harlem.

Here in Australia, the Pink Pony Campaign has raised more than $430,000 since 2002, a quarter of which is from Pink Pony merchandise sales. This year, items from polos and T-shirts to jeans and hoodies, all emblazoned with the large pink pony logo – a reference to the company’s sporting origins – are on sale in Ralph Lauren stores until December.

In the two years since taking the reins at OrotonGroup, which has the licence to sell Polo Ralph Lauren in this country, CEO Sally Macdonald has concentrated on beefing up the Pink Pony Campaign. Last year, funds raised jumped from $60,000 to $100,000. This year, thanks in part to increased awareness since cricketer Glenn McGrath’s wife, Jane, died in June, Macdonald hopes to raise $150,000.

Breast cancer is something that people used not to talk about in Western society. A disease that strikes at the heart of a woman’s femininity, it was virtually taboo. The treatment was terrifying and prognosis generally hopeless. As a result, women were forced to face their fate in stoical silence. Though no longer an automatic death sentence – especially if detected early – breast cancer is still a forbidden subject in many cultures. In some non-English-speaking communities, people believe cancer is a punishment for past misdeeds and women delay seeing a doctor out of a sense of shame.

An important thrust of the Pink Pony Campaign has been helping such women articulate their fears about the disease. A project developed specifically for this is called Making a New Mould. Initiated by Marlin Babakhan, multicultural project officer at Fairfield Health Service, NSW, it has allowed breast cancer sufferers from “culturally and linguistically diverse” backgrounds to take part in art therapy.

Bringing the women together and providing drawing, painting and sculpture sessions gives them a means to express themselves without words, breaks down a lot of fears and crosses a lot of cultural barriers, Babakhan says. “I have seen these women, who were frightened before, now support each other. They can put their fears into words and work through them. They want to help each other as well as other women in their communities.”

About six per cent of Australian women diagnosed with breast cancer are under 40. And when faced with issues such as body image, fertility, dating and the pressure to stay positive when life as they know it is under threat, these young women understandably find it difficult to talk to family and friends. Another Pink Pony initiative, Changes in the Making, is a play that was first staged in 2005 by a group of young women in Victoria. They wrote a script that expressed their needs and how their diagnoses and treatment affected them.

A recent priority of the Pink Pony program has been training indigenous health workers to support indigenous women who have breast cancer, which is the most common cancer among Aboriginal women, according to the most recent figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

John Harding, head of the institute’s cancer monitoring unit, says the mortality rate among Aboriginal women has been higher than for non-Aboriginal women, although this has been falling for both groups. “Outcomes for Aboriginal women might improve if there was higher participation in breast cancer screening through the BreastScreen Australia Program,” Harding says. “In 2004–2005, participation by indigenous women aged 50–69 years was 36 per cent, much lower than the 56 per cent of non-indigenous women.”

Helen Smith, CEO of Cancer Council NT, believes indigenous women have poorer outcomes from breast cancer because they see it as an automatic death sentence and don’t pursue treatment. Instead, “they go back to their communities to fulfil their cultural responsibilities before they die. Also, they need to talk to other members of their clan family. I know from some of the Arnhem Land people – the Yolngu people – that parts of their body belong to different parts of their family, so if they’re going to have any treatment on it, they have to go back and talk to the person who owns that part of their body.”

The Peer Support program developed by Cancer Council NT with Pink Pony funding trained six Aboriginal women living in remote areas, some of whom were breast cancer survivors, to provide support and advice about treatment options to women in places such as Wadeye, Maningrida and Bathurst Island.

“It really has been worthwhile,” says Smith. “We’ve already had one woman on the Tiwi Islands who wasn’t going to come in and follow through with treatment, but when one of the Aboriginal health workers we trained managed to talk to her and came into town with her, she did go through with her treatment.”

Having set this pattern, Smith says Cancer Council NT is now educating Aboriginal health workers in Darwin about breast cancer and other forms of cancer in conjunction with the federal CanNET program. “We’re training them so they can support Aboriginal people when they’re diagnosed with cancer and they become peers because of their Aboriginality, not because of the condition they’ve got. Our next step is to go to Alice Springs and Tennant Creek.”

Sally Macdonald is moved by Pink Pony’s reach into indigenous areas and would like to see it extended into communities of Somalian refugees and Muslim groups. “Ralph Lauren is an enormous global fashion brand yet here we are doing something that’s so practical and applied locally, so from a catwalk in New York you get a pocket guide to (breast cancer) services in Gippsland,” she says. “I think it’s quite nice because a brand that would otherwise be too aspirational is kept warm and whole.”

www.breasthealth.com.au/pinkpony