Skin sores, thick areas, crusts, dimples, redness, fluid, bumps, growing veins, sunkenness, new shapes, ‘orange peel’ skin and hard lumps: the twelve early signs of breast cancer.
Know Your Lemons, a global breast cancer awareness charity, aims to educate individuals about these symptoms in addition to self-testing methods and risk factors through interactive games, lessons and quizzes. After being independent of external academies since its establishment, they have partnered with Cupertino High School’s Future Business Leaders of America chapter to expand their education system to high schools.
As CHS FBLA’s Community Service Project chair, junior Abhisek Buvanesh was required to collaborate with a non-profit organization to expand their platform at the beginning of his term. Buvanesh knew he wanted to partner with an organization he had a personal connection to.
“In a span of five years, two of my aunts were diagnosed with breast cancer, and I saw how cancer disrupts families and their lives,” Buvanesh said. “I knew I wanted to do a project related to breast cancer after [these] experiences.”
Buvanesh searched for various breast cancer awareness groups to collaborate with, finding that most involved fundraising rather than education. After thorough research, Buvanesh discovered and reached out to KYL.
Said Buvanesh, “What stood out about KYL was their mission to improve early detection of breast cancer worldwide through hands-on education and awareness, which is why I partnered with them.”
Buvanesh contacted KYL representatives and pitched his idea in an introductory meeting. After approval, he began recruiting CHS FBLA members to the initiative, assembling a team to support the project. Simultaneously, Buvanesh actively worked with KYL representatives to develop plans to expand the organization’s education base to schools.
“The [KYL] Director of Operations and I spend 30 minutes to an hour every other week discussing ways to raise breast cancer awareness among high schoolers,” Buvanesh said. “We bounce ideas off of each other and always keep our audience in mind. We discuss ideas such as bringing a mammogram machine to schools and creating shirts to distribute to students.”
After several weeks, Buvanesh and KYL formed a well-developed breast cancer educational curriculum to be taught in CHS by students.
“We have tutorials on self-examinations, the twelve signs, screening options and methods to reduce one’s chances of contraction in our lesson plans,” Buvanesh said.
Currently, Buvanesh is training the project team to become student teachers of the program. The group also acts as a pilot audience for each new lesson that KYL and Buvanesh produce.
“The project team helped in getting feedback on breast cancer educational material that we plan to teach in the Physiology class[es] in our school,” Buvanesh said.
Buvanesh and KYL continue to grow the project monthly and plan to implement various new additions in the coming months.
“I hope to implement a similar model across other schools [in the district] and eventually come up with a template that schools nationwide can use to teach about breast cancer to students,” Buvanesh said. “The mission here is to start young, build awareness and help empower the next generation of [people] to take charge of their own health.”
