We are continuing our weekly support spotlight by featuring the local breast cancer support organization – Overcomers. In this spotlight video we are joined with Genny, a co-founder of Overcomers.

What is Overcomers?

Overcomers started back in 2015. It was formed for the purpose of helping women through breast reconstruction and their breast cancer journey.

Because of my personal story of being diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 39 when I was pregnant, I didn’t find a lot of help or resources to assist me following my treatments. I was looking for a way to bridge that gap and came up with the program. Along the way I met my BFF and my partner Jessica and together we have formed this organization that has many branches that help women in multiple facets throughout our city in the surrounding areas. It has been a labor of love and every year we continue to add more programs so we can meet the needs of women and families out there that are really hurting and need a place to have a safe landing and a place to hear some hope. It is definitely a labor of love and passion for us.

When you and Jessica teamed up to create Overcomers, how did you get it started?

2015 was like my valley year. My reconstruction didn’t go the way I had planned. In that year that my expanders were infected and I had to go

flat for a year and then get ready for my DIEP flap. I started developing a curriculum, a weekly course basically, to help women get back on their feet and through that development I met Jessica through a nurse navigator. We sat down and hashed this out. We actually met at the local hospitals first with a very small group of participants for a pilot class and from there we’ve now branched out. This would be our tenth class now coming up. We became an official 501c3 in 2016. We do also a quarterly class for husbands and caregivers and we have our Thrive to a Beautiful You workshops to help women find their beautifulness from the inside as well as externally. We have multiple programs as well as with our Pink Under the Tree program which we love for Christmastime because we get to gather women and their children and just love on them tremendously through the holidays. We’ll be launching a new program as well coming up with our big gala to help meet needs even more in our city.

Can you go into more know about what your classes entail?

The basic the purpose behind the classes is really to help women process what they’ve gone through. So many times we’re in treatment and it’s a fight or flight situation. Basically you just want to get through to the next step. We come alongside them to help them process what they’ve experienced. All the leaders that are on our leadership team are breast cancer survivors…they’ve all walked a specific journey. This way when they are in the small group setting they have a peer and mentor to love on them and encourage them. We range all the way from stage zero to stage four. There’s no one that’s excluded that has had breast cancer because we actually feel that you are a part of our family for life.

We don’t just say ‘thank you for coming to your class talk to you later,’ we really stay with them and we love on them for as long as they want us to. The purpose is to give them a community and a support and for them to feel like ‘okay someone out there understands me.’ We can show empathy and encourage them that everything’s going to be okay.

How can women or men or caregivers who are interested in benefiting from some of these amazing services that you offer contact you?

What’s really been a blessing is we do have several outlets you can find us on. Social medias and an amazing website as well. We also have a YouTube channel. Honestly we try to get ourselves out there as much as possible, especially with us doing the pink gala. It’s our heart to give back and we give back by honoring these medical professionals, nurses, doctors, office administration, whoever has shown love to another person in the breast cancer field. We want to love them and give that back and so we use the gala to do that. A lot of times doctors and nurses who haven’t heard about us before attend the gala or they’re a sponsor and they’re like ‘you know what, we want to rally around them and support them however we can’ and the gala really funds critical programs for us like our annual retreat. We take women to Port Aransas. Last year alone we took 40 women and it was amazing!

I can’t say it enough about the heart behind Overcomers. It is true servant hood. You know Jess and I and the board, we all love what we do and we really believe that we’re here for a purpose and a reason. As long as we’re here, we’re serving.