Know Your Lemons Foundation: The only charity offering global breast health education
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month – and while its purpose in raising awareness of the disease is important, education and early detection is what saves lives. That’s where the Know Your Lemons Foundation steps in; they are the only foundation doing innovative and equitable breast cancer awareness work in global breast health education.
As of 2020, breast cancer has surpassed lung cancer as the most common cancer diagnosed globally – and only 2% of women know all the signs of it. Know Your Lemons produces visual content that is engaging, approachable, memorable, and – above all else – saves lives. Their educational materials stand out amongst a sea of pink ribbons that don’t quite translate into actionable breast health/cancer information.
Honing in on what makes Know Your Lemons different and incredibly effective are their three programs geared toward breast health education:
Know Your Lemons App: Named by the Webby Awards as one of the Top 5 Health and Fitness apps for 2022 – alongside Apple Fitness, Nike Fitness, Warby Parker, and Kaiser Permanente – this is the world’s first app designed to improve early detection for breast cancer. The app has a self-exam guide, allows you to schedule mammograms, and is also a period tracker that doesn’t record any data.
Know Your Lemons Campaign: Available in 32 languages currently, this campaign shows the 12 signs of breast cancer using lemons for a recognizable and easy to understand visual. The foundation did a study with two groups of patients, ones who had seen the campaign and ones who had not – they found the group who had seen the campaign had 39% fewer cases of Stage 4 breast cancer.
Breast School: Know Your Lemons trains volunteers to teach classes in their local communities – this was launched at the start of the pandemic and the charity now has nearly 500 trained educators in 55 countries.
As much as awareness matters, breast health education and tools for early detection – like mammograms and proper self-exams – are what can reduce deaths and allow for a world where women and men feel empowered with knowledge and confidence to report breast changes and participate when screening is available.