In the US, Black women are 42% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women – even when income and access to care are the same – often because they are treated with prejudices that keep them from receiving an equitable standard of care.

Born from its founder’s experiences with unconscious bias and inequality during her own breast cancer treatment, The Chrysalis Initiative is a non-profit that exists to disrupt disparities in breast cancer care. Last year, in partnership with agency, Eversana Intouch, The Chrysalis Initiative created a first-of-its-kind app to help arm Black women battling breast cancer with tools to identify the caliber of support they should be getting. This year they’ve shifted their focus to the healthcare professionals who can affect change, with their campaign, “Inequality You Can’t Ignore.”

Invigorated by several hospitals’ declination to display the campaign in their lobbies, The Chrysalis Initiative took to the streets, placing their visually arresting messages right outside hospital doors on bus shelters that employees were likely to travel past. One of their goals was to force medical providers to face the facts of the huge disparity in breast cancer care and question whether they may be contributing to the poor numbers:

• Due to outdated screening guidelines, Black women are more likely to be diagnosed at a later stage, when it’s more difficult to treat
• Black women are over 2x more likely to experience a two-month delay in receiving treatment
• Black women represent only 3% of participants in breast cancer clinical trials

More importantly, the campaign aimed to motivate doctors to take action to “fill their blind spots” through unconscious bias training offered by The Chrysalis Initiative. This powerful film recaps their successes to date, as well as the emotional stories of three women who were negatively affected by discrimination in their breast cancer care: