August 17, 2022, is Nationwide Nonprofit Day.
HealthyWomen’s unique founder, Violet Bowen-Hugh, M.D., was a pressure of nature. Born and raised in Clendenin, West Virginia, Bowen-Hugh got here from an underprivileged background, which impressed her to create a spot the place ladies, irrespective of their socioeconomic standing, had entry to dependable well being data. As an academically gifted girl who graduated on the prime of her class, Bowen-Hugh was the primary girl in her household to finish highschool. She went on to attend faculty and, upon her commencement, started a profession in accounting.
Bowen-Hugh made an excellent life for herself, however she had a deeply rooted need to assist others. And in the summertime of 1954, she realized that need might not be denied. Impressed by a feminine doctor — one among solely 48 feminine medical doctors within the state — who was treating her nephew within the hospital, she determined to comply with her dream and attend medical faculty.
After graduating, Bowen-Hugh turned a resident on the Columbia Hospital for Girls, one among solely seven ladies’s hospitals on the time, the place she practiced obstetrics and gynecology, ultimately changing into head of the division. Nonetheless not able to cease dreaming, Bowen-Hugh continued preventing for increased high quality healthcare for girls and advocated for extra analysis to be carried out on well being points particular to ladies.
It was this advocacy that alerted Bowen-Hugh to the shortage of scientifically correct details about ladies’s healthcare wants, which led to the creation of the Nationwide Girls’s Well being Useful resource Heart (NWHRC) in 1988. Ultimately rebranded to HealthyWomen in 2009, NWHRC was created to appreciate Bowen-Hugh’s dream of offering ladies with medically vetted, trusted details about their healthcare issues and to reply questions on diagnoses and supply ideas for wholesome dwelling.
The NWHRC started as a 1-800 quantity that girls might name for details about medical situations they’d been recognized with and common well being recommendation. The lady who answered the telephone was Beth Battaglino. Just like Bowen-Hugh’s origin story, Battaglino started by acquiring levels in enterprise and political science however all the time knew she needed to be a nurse. To get her foot within the door, she utilized for a volunteer coordinator place at Columbia Hospital for Girls, however the recruiter noticed one thing particular in Battaglino and really useful she work for the NWHRC as a substitute. Through the day, Battaglino labored as a part of this well being useful resource for girls, and she or he studied to be a registered nurse at night time. Over time, the group flourished and started branching out into new methods to tell its audience. One in every of its hottest choices was a bimonthly publication that targeted on well being situations distinctive to ladies. This text was the precursor to our well-liked Actual Girls, Actual Tales sequence, as ladies shared their experiences with totally different diagnoses in every version. Together with the publication, Battaglino additionally created a database of present well being subjects, sources, organizations and help teams that the NWHRC might present its callers, which turned the template for the HealthyWomen web site.
Beth Battaglino speaks on the fifth Annual HealthyWomen Occasion, March 2022
The mid-’90s noticed a push to combine ladies’s well being and wellness into present way of life publications like Cosmopolitan and Redbook, and the normalization of discussing ladies’s well being subjects allowed the NWHRC to make a reputation for itself. Nevertheless, the late ’90s introduced monetary woes to Columbia Hospital and its closing was imminent. Recognizing that the NWHRC was nonetheless a vital useful resource, Battaglino and two of her colleagues developed a marketing strategy to take over the NWHRC and preserve it working — a plan that paved the best way for HealthyWomen to come back into existence. Because the small however mighty workforce of ladies labored to maintain the NWHRC afloat, they obtained a name from representatives at Johnson and Johnson who needed to study extra in regards to the group and the way the 2 corporations might companion. Battaglino’s ensuing pitch led to a grant that not solely stored the useful resource middle in existence however allowed the NWHRC to be much more formidable than earlier than. Recognizing that the general public and the media’s curiosity in well being and wellness wasn’t abating anytime quickly, Battaglino created a advertising and marketing plan that positioned the middle as a go-to useful resource for girls’s way of life manufacturers and magazines and well being editors. This led to partnerships with manufacturers like Prevention and Mattress, Tub & Past.
As time and expertise superior, the NWHRC transitioned into the web house by changing into the primary ever web site that comprehensively addressed ladies’s well being and wellness points, and in 2009, it rebranded as HealthyWomen. Since then, the location was acknowledged by Forbes Journal as a prime web site for girls three years in a row, and Oprah Journal acknowledged the location as its prime ladies’s well being web site in 2010.
Over time, Battaglino’s position at HealthyWomen has developed, and she or he turned CEO in 2006, positioning HealthyWomen because the go-to well being useful resource for girls.
For greater than three a long time, ladies have trusted HealthyWomen’s extremely researched and dependable data to interact, educate and empower them.
It’s been an honor to be a corporation that girls depend on — and one the HealthyWomen workforce hasn’t taken flippantly at any time in our historical past.
Hearken to our CEO discuss extra in regards to the historical past and evolution of HealthyWomen.
