The Young Women Christian Association of San Antonio was awarded a $1.4 million grant to screen women in Bexar County for breast and cervical cancer while connecting them with primary care doctors.
The YWCA San Antonio has been running its “From Doorstep to Diagnosis” program for the better part of a decade, serving around 600 women annually. The YWCA San Antonio hosts the screenings, free health checkups and prevention education on a monthly basis at its two locations on Castroville Road on the West Side.
Women below 100% of the federal poverty line and those whose health insurance doesn’t cover the costs of breast and cervical cancer screenings in a way that’s affordable to them are eligible for the program.
Preventative care and early detection is important for breast cancer and cervical cancer, both significantly more treatable and less costly if they’re detected early on. South Texas has higher rates of late-stage cervical cancer.
The extra funding, awarded through Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, will allow the organization to expand its reach to Black women in San Antonio through a collaboration with WestCare Texas, a nonprofit on the near East Side offering an array of behavioral health and social services.
“When we’re looking at the data of the women that we’ve served, one demographic that we knew we were not serving to the best of our ability was African American women,” said Corin Reyes, chief programing officer for health and education at the YWCA San Antonio. “[WestCare] has the cultural competence, the education, the connections to do outreach in that community.”
Frankly, Reyes said, the money will also help keep the lights on amid shifts in federal funding. The program had been benefiting from COVID-19 relief funds that expired.
The program also supported vaccine equity work by connecting underserved women with primary care providers and encouraging them to get needed vaccinations, previously leaning on funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. But that money disappeared at the beginning of the year for the YWCA San Antonio and many other organizations, Reyes said.
“Things have changed politically, in the political landscape, very severely over the last year,” she said. “So this funding is very crucial to ensuring that we can continue to serve the population that we’ve been serving.”
With potential health insurance premium increases on the horizon for over 200,000 Bexar County residents who rely on the Affordable Care Act marketplace, the timing of the grant is crucial, Reyes added.
“We’re going to see a lot more needs, so we’re going to need to kind of ramp it up,” she said. “This is going to be critical.”