Many Johnson Countians are, by now, familiar with Back in the Swing, the annual program that fights the effects of breast cancer through the power of positive shopping.
Supporters can buy $25 Back in the Swing cards, entitling them to discounts at participating retailers and shopping centers. In this, its eighth year, the program includes almost every major retail center in town.
Back in the Swing is the brainchild of Leawood couple Barbara and Bob Unell and has grown with the support of many other Johnson Countians. The Unells singled out Jeff Alpert of Hawthorne Plaza, who was the first shopping-center developer to support them.
And now, fellow Leawood resident Scott Krigel is helping the Unells spread Back in the Swing across the country, using the clout of his company, StoreFinancial, an industry-leading provider of gift-card programs to shopping centers. StoreFinancial administers more than 400 gift-card programs.
Krigel's firm provides the technical know-how to make the program work. But more importantly, he served to introduce the Unells and Back in the Swing to two of the nation's largest shopping-center development and management firms.
The trio traveled to Cleveland in a January snowstorm to meet representatives of Forest City Enterprises and Developers Diversified Realty.
"We met with these two giant developers who said ‘Yeah, we will do it for you.' They jumped at the opportunity to do it," Krigel said. "The target audience for Back in the Swing - which is women - is their demographic, and they thought the card was great."
Thus, the program will roll out this month in about 40 shopping centers the two firms run in Chicago, Cleveland and elsewhere. That compares to 44 centers and dozens of stand-alone stores in greater Kansas City.
"It's clear that their directors of marketing had immense respect for Scott," Bob Unell said. "He got us in the door. And when we explained our mission - to expand post-treatment care - they wanted to take ownership of the event. ... We walked out of that meeting with our dream of national expansion in hand."
The point of Back in the Swing - beyond providing breast-cancer survivors with something to feel good about and look forward to - is to use the proceeds to encourage the development of survivorship programs.
It does this in a variety of ways, from supporting clinical research on survivorship at the University of Kansas Cancer Center to creating curricula for oncology nurses to help their patients survive not just the cancer but the nasty after-effects of many treatments.
Barbara Unell, herself a breast-cancer survivor, was inspired to create the program by a 2002 New York Times article about shopping as a life-affirming experience.
She has now lived long enough to see the work funded by Back in the Swing start to make an impact on cancer care around the country.
"People from Northwestern University, Duke, the University of Michigan, Sloane-Kettering have started visiting Kansas City and seeing the work being done here and its beneficiaries," she said. "People are opening up their minds to the fact that these issues are real on a clinical level."
"It's wonderful to see this movement grow," Bob said.
"This little card has been changing health care in Kansas City for eight years now, and we wanted to train health-care providers across the country to provide this kind of health care," Barbara said. "That was the impetus behind the national expansion." >>...read more.