This Isn’t A Demure Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign

Tits Deep for Breast Cancer is a nonprofit that focuses on young women, particularly under forty, because there's a gap in care for that age category. Research shows that breast cancer in young women is rising. I, myself, am high risk and felt that huge gap in not knowing where to go, who to see, and what to do.

We also want to target women who might not even have any known risk or aren’t certain based on their family history. We believe that by doing the work that we do, we can help women catch cancer early enough to be life-saving. We want to change that narrative: we’re young, but we’re not too young to get breast cancer.

The majority of our fundraising goes to funding mammograms for women under forty: whether they have partial coverage, no coverage, are in treatment, including prophylactic treatment, or are recently post-op. We have a financial aid program where women share the need in the application, and we send them the check, and it’s up to them to use it how they see fit.

When I found out my friend Nadine had breast cancer in September 2020, I went all in trying to help her. She kept talking about how stressed she was about medical bills. Someone had already started a GoFundMe, but I wanted to do something more.

After a few months, the name “Tits Deep” just flashed into my head while I was driving home from the grocery store. It made sense: we were best powder day friends, snowboard instructors at the same mountain.

I had stickers made and started selling them for $5 out of my jacket at the mountain. I thought I’d sell 300 and be done. We sold out in five days, had a backorder list, ordered more, and kept selling out—even people from different countries found us.

In under two months, I was able to give her $11,000. That’s when I started thinking about how to impact more women, because I could already see how much of a need there was. We weren’t even an entity yet. From there, it slowly grew into merchandise, events, and figuring out our mission.

I was very intentional about growing it, because it [started as] an accident. It felt organic, and it still does. From April to December 2021, I filed as an LLC just to have structure, but ran it like a nonprofit. Then I spent two years understanding our direction and whether becoming a 501(c)(3) made sense. People warned me about the red tape, but once I found the right board members and understood how we wanted to distribute funds, we had to go that route. We applied in December 2023 and got IRS designation in June 2024.

Now, about a year and a half later, we’ve launched our programs and can distribute funds the way we see fit. There may be other organizations doing similar work, but there still aren’t enough. Sometimes we’re the first experience someone has getting reimbursed or having a mammogram covered, and we get to help them. It feels really good.

It’s really been an evolution. There was no true intention behind the branding: the focus was to help my best friend who was diagnosed with breast cancer. The original “Tits Deep” sticker is now our logo.

It’s also my personality. Before Nadine’s diagnosis, I had already started getting mammograms [and talking about it on my social media,] so I became more comfortable vocalizing and showing my body in that way.

When I started campaigning for Nadine, I got really loud on my personal Instagram to reach more people and ramp up fundraising. I got cheeky: taking my top off on a mountain with the sticker [over my breast], embracing the female body in an empowering way. That rolled into events, like mountain biking: we would get to the top of a mountain with a group of women and do our iconic tops-off photo. It feels really empowering, losing that insecurity and not caring about other people seeing your body.

If we’re comfortable in our own body, then when we have to go get a mammogram and take our tops off, there’s less negativity. It’s more like: I’ve done this before, I didn’t care then, and I won’t care now. It’s about breaking stigmas around women’s health and how women should portray themselves.

Putting “Tits Deep” on hats, shirts, and skis is attention-grabbing. It becomes a talking point. I’ve heard a story of these [two people] on a chairlift, and one had a Tits Deep sticker on their skis—and the person sitting next to them on the chairlift was really closed off about sharing [about her] breast cancer, because it was just too raw for her to talk about out loud. The person with the Tits Deep on her skis was currently in treatment, and they started talking—and that was one of the first times the other person was able to share about herself. It’s a talking point.

It creates curiosity, even for people who don't have a relationship to cancer, who have the opportunity to see what we're doing and support us. It feels really good to wear something that’s for a cause that hits close to home, or to feel a sense of belonging. Or it's just cool.

In my personal life, I have found that outdoor adventure sports make it really easy to connect. Whether it’s a five-minute chairlift ride or meeting someone in the lineup while surfing, there’s already a shared understanding. Then you add Tits Deep for Breast Cancer, the community, and the purpose behind the work, and the level of connection is so strong. People come to events not knowing each other and leave with friends.

A lot of people find us through events—either they know someone on the team, or something about the branding catches their eye and they want to participate. It’s a blend, but more often than not, people don’t know about us at first and then they’re just all in.

When you’re in those environments, it’s easier to be vulnerable. You're not the patient who's never been able to talk to an OBGYN in this type of setting before. She gets to share her knowledge with everyone on the floor [before the ride], when everyone is in all their mountain bike clothes. And then after the talk’s done, we all hit the trail together. So it just breaks down barriers or stereotypes or social structures.

It’s been very organic. Our Tahoe chapter started with Jill, who found us while going through social media. She was going through breast cancer as an under-forty-year-old mount biker, climber, split-boarder and snowboarder. And then through an event that we were a vendor at, we met someone else in Tahoe who helps run a women's organization called Dames of Dirt. Tiffany really stepped up. They’re both self-starters and started planning events like mountain biking and ski lapathons. Then with Bend, this woman reached out on social media, like: ‘I work in a cancer department, and I ski and I mountain bike: can I be a chapter leader?’

Places like Boston, there’s a huge presence in New England. And then I would say, Bozeman would be great to expand into if we find the right people.

The biggest dream is to create enough income flow to support a paid executive director position, because right now it’s 100% volunteer. It would also be great to have a small team to help scale: getting in front of more people, helping more people, and increasing funding to elevate events and merchandise. As we grow, more women under forty will learn about us, apply to the program, and we can distribute more funding.