PERSON OF THE WEEK: In 2005, Molly MacDonald was diagnosed with breast cancer. Today, she counts herself among breast cancer's survivors – or, in her words, a ‘SurThrivor.’ Formerly the Internet marketing manager for Shore Mortgage, headquartered in Birmingham, Mich., she is now the founder and chairwoman of The Pink Fund, a nonprofit that assists breast cancer patients who have lost their stream of income by helping to pay some of their basic living expenses for up to 90 days.
MortgageOrb spoke with MacDonald regarding her extraordinary personal and professional odyssey.
Q: What is The Pink Fund, and what circumstances inspired your creation of this nonprofit?
MacDonald: I was diagnosed with breast cancer at a time of job transition. I thought I was pretty darned smart by using that interim period to get my teeth cleaned, have my annual physical and, of course, get that test every woman over 40 looks forward to annually.
I have no family history of breast cancer and never had a lump or bump, and my diagnosis on April 1, 2005, came as a total shock. For 40,000 women a year, that news is a death sentence. While it was unlikely my early-stage disease was going to take my life, it did take my livelihood for six months while I underwent two surgeries and six weeks of daily radiation – and as head of the household for my family, my income was absolutely critical to our very basic needs.Â
Questions like ‘Do we make the house payment or the COBRA payment?’ resulted in foreclosure notices beginning to show up in my mailbox. We were behind on everything. But thanks to my mildly demented mother, who wanted ‘to help Molly,’ and my sister, who agreed, we rescued the house: My mother made the house payments for a few months, while my husband and I started a small marketing company, Tamale Group.
At the conclusion of my treatment, when all our neighbors stopped delivering lasagna in every form imaginable, we had no money for food, and I found myself standing in line at the local food bank. During that summer, as we were staring down the reality that this short-term medical crisis could cause us to lose our home, we had our car repossessed and our lights turned off permanently. I began to ask, ‘How can I get help?’Â
When I learned there was nothing to remedy this particular situation, my despair and anger caused a flip to switch in my mind, and ‘How can I get help?’ became ‘How can I give help?’
Energized and empowered, without any knowledge of the nonprofit world, I began to raise a little bit of money and look for someone who needed help. The medical writer at The Detroit Free Press, Pat Anstett, helped to launch The Pink Fund on Oct. 1, 2006. Andrew Pritchard of Inspire Consulting was so inspired (no pun intended) by what I was trying to do that he agreed to donate a simple website, and we were off.
Q: What strategies and skills from your mortgage banking career have you been able to transfer to your work in running The Pink Fund?
MacDonald: Going to work for Shore Mortgage was a blessing on many fronts. I knew very little about the industry, but a lot about consumer behavior and what makes people buy from one company over another.
I had been doing some contract work for some of Shore Financial Services' other companies, when its chairman, Jeffrey Ishbia, called me into his office and offered me a full-time job in the marketing department. As I began to understand and grasp the mortgage process and witness just how careful Shore was in qualifying folks for a mortgage, I could see how I might be able to pattern The Pink Fund application process to mirror that of getting a loan for a mortgage.
We took our application and patterned it much like a loan application, replacing a credit report with a medical report. Every month, a processor reviews all the files to ensure that all documents are in order. Then, each month, the files go to a committee that is similar to an underwriting department. The process is blind in that we do not know much about the person, other than their medical diagnosis and the fact that they are out of work and not collecting an income while in treatment.
The committee is made up of licensed social workers, survivors, a retired automotive dealer whose eagle eye from years of looking at credit applications is trained to spot fraud, a human resources consultant who helps with understanding employment issues, and a couple of volunteers who rotate monthly.
Once we qualify the applicant – provided funds are available – we make their bill payments directly to their creditors for up to 90 days. This gives them some time to focus on healing, looking at their financial options and – ultimately and ideally – returning to work. Our goal is to prevent these families from going into a financial free fall.
Q: What are The Pink Fund's current goals and activities – and how can mortgage bankers get involved in helping the fund?
MacDonald: Currently, we only fund in Michigan and California, as that is where the money has been raised. My goal is to create a centralized office, where, like Quicken Loans or Shore Financial Services, those in need can jump on the Web, fill out an application electronically and use an e-signature. I would love to bring in mortgage bankers, retired loan processors and underwriters as volunteers to help us evaluate the applications – those folks have great experience that we could use.
Mortgage bankers can get involved by direct giving, and we could create a fund from them where the money would be directly earmarked for housing-related professionals. For example, the Realtor sector is made up of thousands of women who could be diagnosed with breast cancer and unable to work – and in jeopardy of experiencing something similar to my scenario.
Imagine if every female Realtor or mortgage banker in the U.S. jumped on our website and donated just one dollar toward helping to make someone else's house payment – how many families we could help?
A Realtor out of Texas – Kimberly Meneke at Ribbons of Hope Realty, and a SurThrivor – is already helping us by giving back a commission from every home she closes to The Pink Fund. Kimberly hopes to help us get a stronghold in Texas and other states where she might list and sell property.
Q: As a breast cancer survivor – or, as you refer to yourself, SurThrivor – what advice can you offer to those who are diagnosed with this disease?
MacDonald: Surviving breast cancer is not a choice. Many of us, despite the best medical care and our ‘pull up our bra straps’ attitudes, do not survive the disease. But while we are here, we do have a choice about what we would like to do as a result of this ‘gift’ which arrives looking like someone's idea of a Pink Elephant.
We can thrive through it, and we can even over-thrive by choosing to give back and make a difference – we can SurThrive! And in the end, living or dead, cancer cannot take away what a SurThrivor does in response to the disease. For me, it was all about helping to pave the way for another patient coming up behind me, because there are around a quarter of a million women a year walking in the shoes I wore for awhile – and each of them, in their own way, can make some kind of difference.
