Meet two community gems: FoundCare and the Promise Fund of Florida.
Both deliver health care to underinsured and uninsured women. FoundCare treats all adults and children as well.
They converged May 1 when Nancy Brinker of the Promise Fund joined with U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick to tour Palm Springs-based FoundCare’s second Palm Beach County location.
FoundCare spent more than $6 million buying and renovating a former bank building at 5867 Okeechobee Blvd.
Cherfilus-McCormick gave Brinker a check for $894,000 from her allotment of community project funding. The money will go from the Promise Fund to FoundCare to be used on equipment, renovation expenses and operations, including fees for reading radiology reports and sending out mammogram results.
The Promise Fund is getting an additional $2.7 million total from Congress, with earmarks also coming from Democratic U.S. Reps Lois Frankel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Brinker, a former ambassador to Hungary, is famous for starting the Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer organization and its international Race for the Cure.
“We are incredibly grateful to FoundCare that they built this type of facility to welcome people who had first arrived in fear and then leave smiling,” Brinker said in her remarks.
The Promise Fund pays for “navigators” who “reach into underserved communities to find women who often haven’t set foot in a doctor’s office in years and convince them to re-engage with the medical system,” Brinker says on the fund’s website.
Some are stationed at clinics such as FoundCare or the Caridad Center west of Boynton Beach.
Others go into communities, forging relationships with churches and placing flyers in food pantry bags.
“We have educated, screened, navigated, and treated over 18,000 women in Palm Beach County,” the Promise Fund website says. Its goal is to reach all 80,000 uninsured women in Palm Beach County by 2024.
The Promise Fund helped FoundCare, which is raising $10 million to build a clinic on city-owned land in Riviera Beach, obtain a mammography machine two years ago.
“We went from screening 100 women to 3,000 women,” FoundCare CEO Chris Irizarry said.
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