Learn About Courage From This Founder Who Is Saving And Changing Lives

By Laurel Donnellan and Sarah Feely (originally published at Forbes.com)

In 1993, Karen Eubanks Jackson was living in Los Angeles, going through chemo, radiation, and surgery, and looking for help. She figured she could call a toll-free number for a national organization serving Black women with breast cancer, and somebody would pick up and tell her what to do.

That number didn’t exist. So she created it.

In 1994, Sisters Network became a national organization. Eubanks Jackson would answer the phone, “National Headquarters, Sisters Network.” She was the only person there.

Today she’s a 31-year-old, four-time breast cancer survivor, and Sisters Network Inc. is the oldest and largest national Black breast cancer survivorship organization in the country, with more than 25 survivor-run affiliate chapters. This year she received the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s 2025 Patient Advocate Award.

Sarah Feely, President of Compassionate Leaders Circle, recently sat down with Eubanks Jackson for a talk about courage, truth, and purpose-driven leadership. Here’s what stayed with me from the inspiring interview. 

Courage Is Something You See Looking Back

Compassionate Leaders Circle teaches courage as the first remarkable leadership principle. Sarah calls it the ticket on the train. You can be as excited as you want about an idea, but if you won’t step on when the train pulls in, it leaves without you.

When Sarah asked how that word landed, Eubanks Jackson laughed. People always ask why she started Sisters. Almost nobody asks about courage.

“That’s something you have to have hindsight for,” she said. “It doesn’t happen like that.” The practice that strengthens courage is “be a visionary,” or to look beyond what is now and create a better future. 

In the moment, she had instinct and a real dislike of losing. Friends and family asked the obvious questions. No money, no experience, and you think you can build a national organization? Her answer was yes.

“If I thought about all of the challenges, I probably wouldn’t have started,” she said.

Her advice to the high school students she speaks with: stop waiting for your ducks to line up. If you believe in what you’re doing, the money, the education, and the backing will come with time.

Telling the Truth Before Anyone Wants to Hear It

In the early 1990s, the unfair public story that fed unfair bias about Black women and breast cancer care was ugly. ‘They did not show up; they did not care, etc.’

Eubanks Jackson didn’t see that in the women she met during treatment. What she saw was a medical system that didn’t have the right answers yet. Triple negative breast cancer, an aggressive form that disproportionately affects Black women, didn’t even have a name back then. Screening guidelines said to get a first mammogram at 40, while many women in her community were being diagnosed in their 20s and 30s.

Sisters Network knew in 1994 that 40 was too late. Convincing people took years, and her own community questioned why a separate organization was needed at all.

That’s the part of truth-telling we don’t talk about enough. Sometimes you’re right for a long time before anyone agrees with you.

“Why Are We Whispering?”

Eubanks Jackson built the organization to confront the silence, shame and stigma around breast cancer. She was never ashamed of her diagnosis and said so openly. Women would come up to her and whisper in her ear that they were survivors too.

“And I said, well, why are we whispering?”

That question grew into the organization’s national STOP THE SILENCE® campaign. Thirty years later, women talk openly about their diagnoses, and some of the chapters she started at the very beginning are still going strong. “We have chapters 30 years old,” she said. “I mean, who does that?”

The next frontier is policy, which she called “a slow grind.” Sisters Network is launching a Center for Public Policy to lead its state policy agenda and train survivors in advocacy through the chapters.

Hope Has a Structure

Sarah shared a psychological theory that says hope needs three things: willpower, way power (a sense of the path), and agency, the belief that you have some say in where you’re going. When she named the third, Eubanks Jackson jumped in with one word: “Now.”

She ties hope directly to purpose. “When you’re living your purpose every day, it gives you hope,” she said. “It gives you direction.”

She described hearing a voice when she started Sisters, one that was “strong, direct, and I didn’t have a choice.” People who find their calling often say something similar. You don’t get tired of it.

Leaders Keep Learning

When the pandemic hit, Sisters Network was an in-person organization. Many nonprofits closed. Eubanks Jackson didn’t. The organization taught its leaders to run webinars, and those leaders taught the members.

“It’s the best thing that ever happened to us,” she said. “We survived and grew.”

She’s also clear about putting the right people in the right seats. Her vice president is her daughter, who grew up alongside the organization and brought the media background behind SIS: Sisters in Survivorship, the organization’s Telly Award-winning podcast. “I don’t know how to do a podcast,” Eubanks Jackson said, with zero apology.

The Sisterhood Was the Point

Members greet each other with a phrase: “I love you just the way you are.”

“I am not the same person before breast cancer,” she said. She kept what she wanted from her old self and let go of the rest.

My favorite detail from the whole conversation? She never set out to build anything. She just wanted to join.

“I would have been a good member, though.”

The National Black Breast Cancer Summit takes place this October. You can learn more, join a chapter, or share an idea here. And her closing advice is worth keeping close: “Life is beautiful. I just look for the best of whatever it is, and I claim it.”