by Barbara A. Brenner
Every once in a while, someone sees BCA’s Avon-related activities and says to us, “Not that Avon thing again!” As BCA moves forward with our cutting-edge advocacy on behalf of women’s lives, it’s important that people understand where our Avon work fits with BCA’s policy priorities. Maybe the best place to start is with the history.
Back in the spring of 2000, I wrote a column for the BCA Newsletter titled “Exercise Your Mind,” which looked at athletic events raising money for breast cancer and focused on the largest ones—Komen and Avon. In the article, I encouraged people to ask where the money would end up and to refuse to support events if you couldn’t get the answer to that question, or if the answer you got didn’t suit you.
As often happens with grassroots activity, that newsletter column turned into an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, and then turned into a full-fledged campaign as we heard from other organizations that were concerned about those issues and appreciated our articulating them. Ultimately, the effort evolved into Follow the Money: An Alliance for Accountability in Breast Cancer.
Follow the Money representatives had one meeting with the Avon Foundation leadership in 2001. While much was promised in that meeting about openness, the company never responded to the letter we sent following up on the meeting. Rather than sit on our hands, Follow the Money, led by BCA, built alliances with socially responsible investment activists who hold Avon stock. Follow the Money calls on Avon to do four things:
As a result of Follow the Money’s work, Avon dropped Palotta Team Works as the event coordinator for its breast cancer walks. Unfortunately, one result of this change is that Avon now provides less information than Palotta used to about the amount raised and how it’s spent following each walk.
Beginning in 2003, Follow the Money began using shareholder activism to engage the company’s shareholders on the issues of concern to so much of the breast cancer community. One of the shareholder resolutions called on Avon to take toxins—either known or suspected to be contributing to breast cancer—out of its products.
Follow the Money has also succeeded in encouraging Avon to fund some environmental research (via grants to the Silent Spring Institute), and to support some wonderful organizations that BCA works with, which provide direct services to underserved women. Unfortunately, the grants are much smaller than the spin that Avon gets from making them.
As result of those successful efforts, Avon indicated prior to the May 2004 shareholder meeting that it was interested in the meeting suggested by our shareholder allies. Unfortunately, no progress has been made toward having that meeting.
On the other hand, thanks in part to our groundbreaking work on toxins in Avon’s cosmetics, many other voices have come together to create the national Safe Cosmetics Campaign, which is now pushing Avon and many other cosmetics companies to make their products safe for all of their consumers.
While clearly much has been accomplished, and much remains to be done in light of Follow the Money’s goals, BCA’s work in connection with Avon is central to many other policy issues that are part of BCA’s work.
Our leadership on the environmental causes of breast cancer implicates Avon, as is evident from our focus in the 2003 Think Before You Pink advertisement (view the ad online at thinkbeforeyoupink.org), our work on the national cosmetics-safety campaign, and our co-sponsorship of California legislation that would require cosmetics companies to notify the public about the carcinogens and reproductive toxins in their products.
Our work on access to quality health care at the local level involves Avon because the company has created a misnamed “Comprehensive Breast Center” at the only public health hospital in San Francisco, where the breast clinic struggles to meet the needs of the city’s poorest residents.
BCA’s work to spark a research revolution also involves Avon because the company is the largest corporate funder of breast cancer research. (Read about BCA’s call to coordinate breast cancer research…)
And BCA’s call for the company to be transparent in its fundraising and funding practices reflects our role as the leading breast cancer watchdog organization.
As BCA moves forward with its advocacy on these issues, it is essential that we understand who the players are and how they function, and that we engage them from a base of knowledge and experience. BCA’s history with Avon and our collaborative work with other organizational members of the Follow the Money Alliance provide a base from which we can intelligently and strategically engage the corporate world involved in breast cancer.
So, the next time you hear someone wonder aloud why BCA is still doing this Avon thing, let them know it’s about more than Avon—much more.
TAKE ACTION: Find out more about Follow the Money’s efforts, and get involved in the campaign to make Avon accountable, at www.bcaction.org.
© 2010, Breast Cancer Action
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