Community Micro-Grant Spotlight: Pinktopps – Building a Healthier Future after Breast Cancer
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, a time to create awareness and honor the millions of lives affected by breast cancer (WHO, 2025). For Alabama’s Pinktopps, this month is also about honoring people who have faced breast cancer and to spotlight programs that help survivors thrive. The Forge AHEAD Center is proud to support Pinktopps Inc. through our Community Micro-Grant Program for their project, “Pinktopps Building a Healthier Future after Breast Cancer”. This community-based wellness initiative focuses on the real work of returning to life as normal as possible, one step at a time.
Pinktopps’ project is exactly the kind of community-first innovation the Forge AHEAD Center aims to lift up. The Center’s efforts place values on programs that are rooted in local culture, led by people with lived experience, and designed to be sustainable beyond the grant period.
Who the program serves and why it matters
Pinktopps targets young survivors and women with limited healthcare access who often face challenges to follow-up care and wellness resources. The program also provides education and support for families and caregivers, so recovery is supported at home. By focusing on younger survivors ages 19 to 45, Pinktopps supports a population that is building families, careers, and community roles while coping with survivorship.
This work matters because the transition from clinic to “life after treatment” is a time requiring increased support. Programs like Pinktopps help survivors move from short-term recovery into long-term wellness through peer-led support, practical skills, and connections to local resources.
A program built from lived experience
Pinktopps was created with the understanding that surviving cancer is not only a clinical journey. It is a life change that touches the body, emotions, relationships, spirit, and daily routines. The program centers lived experience at every level. Facilitators and peer leaders are trained to lead with their own histories in mind. That shared experience creates trust and makes it easier for participants to try new strategies, ask hard questions, and stay engaged. Peer leaders, survivor participants, and family members shape every session and every resource. Their leadership creates programs that are respectful, useful, and ready to be shared across communities.
The program sits on three core principles. First, health promotion that gives survivors practical tools for daily life. Second, community engagement that brings trusted local networks into the work. Third, peer empowerment that values survivor leadership and pushes decision making down to the people the program serves. Together these principles shape a holistic and sustainable model of survivorship care.
The Wellness Wheel: a whole-person curriculum
Pinktopps uses a Wellness Wheel Model that integrates six domains of health. Each domain is taught in ways that are practical, developed with input from community partners to reflect local context, and trauma informed.
Physical Wellness
Strengthening the body through movement adapted from physical therapy principles, good sleep habits, and gentle exercise that meets survivors where they are.
Nutritional Wellness
Practical education on meal planning, cooking on a budget, and ways to use anti-inflammatory foods to support recovery and long-term health.
Emotional Wellness
Group counseling, peer support circles, and journaling workshops that help people process what they have been through and build emotional tools for the future.
Spiritual Wellness
Mindfulness, guided meditation, nature therapy, and gratitude practices that support inner restoration and resilience.
Social Wellness
Safe spaces for social reengagement, relationship building, and reconnecting with family, friends, and community after treatment.
Environmental Wellness
Hands-on activities like growing food, nature-based sessions, and guidance on choosing eco-conscious health products that support a healthier home and neighborhood.
This Breast Cancer Survivor Month, help us spread the word. Share this post with your networks, invite a survivor to a Pinktopps session, or connect a community partner who can help grow the program. When communities and researchers work together, survivors gain both the practical tools and the social support they need to thrive.
Written by: Carol Agomo, Ph.D.
