News from IBC Research Foundation

By, Ginny Mason, RN, BSN

Executive Director, ibcRF

Just a year ago, October 14, 2008, an interesting message came through the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation's website with a subject line of "IBC Donation." The message was from Bryon Davis, a Board member of the Milburn Foundation, a family charitable foundation from San Luis Obispo, California. In that message, Mr. Davis indicated his organization was interested in partnering with the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation to fund research benefiting inflammatory breast cancer patients. I responded to the message and made arrangements to speak with Mr. Davis about this opportunity.

Since that first contact, we have had many telephone and cyberspace communications. We are delighted that the Milburn Foundation has chosen to support the work of the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Thanks to this partnership, we were able to award a research grant to Diane Palmieri, Ph.D, of the National Cancer Institute (see "IBC Research Foundation Awards Grant to Study Brain Metastasis of IBC above) and will soon announce another grant award as well.

A few months ago, I asked Mr. Davis to provide background about the Milburn Foundation to share with our readers. Hopefully, these questions and responses will help you get to know this group and their important role in supporting inflammatory breast cancer research and other areas of health care.

How did the Milburn Foundation start? The Milburn Foundation (milburngift.org) was created to support leaders who are making a difference in the fight against critical health care challenges, like Inflammatory Breast Cancer. We believe in the importance of supporting and developing leadership, not just donating funds. We seek to support those who consistently cut through the road blocks that stop others from achieving results.

The genesis of the Milburn Foundation is through a family-backed private foundation. This is the right structure for us to begin working on our goals. We are positioning ourselves on many levels (i.e. professional associations, people, processes, finances, etc), to be a catalyst for action over the long term. We are building a network of international partners and volunteers to give our team greater scale as we plan for growth over the next 5, 10 and 20+ years.

Why start a private foundation? A private charitable foundation, as opposed to an operating charitable foundation, is essentially one that does not engage directly in charitable work. Rather, a private foundation supports those who are already committed to worthy causes. There are compelling advantages to this structure given our objectives.

The private foundation model makes sense for us, because we want to focus on supporting and developing leadership in solving health care issues. We have a fundamental belief that by helping to develop multiple leading organizations, we can affect the greatest amount of benefit from our work. Very simply, if we can assist in advancing and aligning the goals of leaders across separate like-minded charitable organizations, the chances for creating high-impact progress improves dramatically. Our donations and gifts always have this end goal in mind.

What do you hope to accomplish with the organization? Our first priority is Inflammatory Breast Cancer. Our family has been touched by this disease in a very personal way, and we want to empower impactful work that will move the research community significantly closer to a cure. We see a continued association with the IBC Research Foundation as an important part of meeting this objective.

Longer term, we are creating an organization that bridges different charities/researchers to solve critical health care issues. Broadly speaking, our objective will be to identify and support both leaders within organizations and leading organizations themselves. We define leaders as those who have passion, vision, and an ability to drive results. We believe effective leadership can be employed by those with the will to make a difference and an ability to act thoughtfully, yet decisively. This is true on both the individual and organizational level.

Who makes up your organization? Our Board of Directors is comprised of two MBAs, two RNs, and a former Human Resources Professional and Salvation Army Board Member. Our complementary management expertise includes: Military Service (Retired Coronel USAF), Management Consulting (Deloitte), Start Up Ventures, Pediatric and General Nursing, as well as Corporate HR.

Our volunteers include those in the following fields: Management Consulting and Operations, Medical (Doctor), Marketing, Teaching, Student and Financial Planning/Wealth Management. We are also building alliances or associations with a number of charities, both in the USA and internationally.

What future plans do you have for the organization? As mentioned above, our plan is to build both a robust volunteer and partner network to support our goals and objectives into the future. We are organizing our foundation much as one might structure a business. Our board provides high level strategic direction, then our volunteer executives implement the strategy and work together across different functional areas (i.e. Finance, Medical Advisory, Marketing/Sales/Fund Raising, HR, Legal, Operations, IT, etc) to achieve results.

Our plan is to assign a volunteer executive to each functional area. We are looking for people that are passionate and committed to making a change in health care, both locally and globally. We are also looking for folks who are open to a virtual volunteer environment, since this is how we often operate. In exchange for our volunteer's time, we are offering people a chance to build their resumes with what we hope are exciting projects. Additionally, we are testing the concept of listing volunteer's names and a brief outline of what they do on our website. We think this is "fun" recognition for a job well done, but we also respect people's privacy if they don't care for this type of publicity.

With a growing team of professional volunteers, we hope to be able to give ever increasing contributions to the IBC Research Foundation. We see the IBC Research Foundation as a valuable partner in the fight against Inflammatory Breast Cancer.

For those who might be interested, more information is available on the MilburnGift.org website. Kindly note we are a different organization from the one listed at Milburnfoundation.com and Milburnfoundation.org.

Thanks to Mr. Davis for his thoughtful responses to my questions and giving us an opportunity to learn more about their mission, vision, and goals. We look forward to a long and productive relationship with the Milburn Foundation.

As noted above, you can find more information about the Milburn Foundation at: MilburnGift.org