August 17, 2022, is Nationwide Nonprofit Day.
HealthyWomen’s authentic founder, Violet Bowen-Hugh, M.D., was a drive 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 girls, irrespective of their socioeconomic standing, had entry to dependable well being data. As an academically gifted lady who graduated on the prime of her class, Bowen-Hugh was the primary lady in her household to finish highschool. She went on to attend faculty and, upon her commencement, started a profession in accounting.
Bowen-Hugh made a great life for herself, however she had a deeply rooted need to assist others. And in the summertime of 1954, she realized that need may not be denied. Impressed by a feminine doctor — considered one of 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 college.
After graduating, Bowen-Hugh turned a resident on the Columbia Hospital for Girls, considered one of solely seven girls’s hospitals on the time, the place she practiced obstetrics and gynecology, finally turning into head of the division. Nonetheless not able to cease dreaming, Bowen-Hugh continued preventing for greater high quality healthcare for girls and advocated for extra analysis to be executed on well being points particular to girls.
It was this advocacy that alerted Bowen-Hugh to the shortage of scientifically correct details about girls’s healthcare wants, which led to the creation of the Nationwide Girls’s Well being Useful resource Middle (NWHRC) in 1988. The NWHRC realized Bowen-Hugh’s dream of offering girls with medically vetted, trusted details about their healthcare considerations and to reply questions on diagnoses and supply suggestions for wholesome dwelling.
The NWHRC started as a 1-800 quantity that girls may 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 helpful 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 he or she studied to be a registered nurse at evening. Over time, the group flourished and started branching out into new methods to tell its audience. Certainly one of its hottest choices was the Nationwide Girls’s Well being Report, a bimonthly e-newsletter, which centered on well being situations distinctive to girls. The e-newsletter was a precursor to our well-liked Actual Girls, Actual Tales collection, as girls shared their experiences with the featured analysis in every version. Together with the e-newsletter, Battaglino additionally created a database of present well being matters, sources, organizations and help teams that the NWHRC may present its callers, which turned the template for the HealthyWomen.org web site.
Beth Battaglino speaks on the fifth Annual HealthyWomen Occasion, March 2022
The mid-’90s noticed a push to combine girls’s well being and wellness into present life-style publications like Cosmopolitan and Redbook, and the normalization of discussing girls’s well being matters allowed the NWHRC to make a reputation for itself. Nonetheless, the late ’90s introduced monetary woes to Columbia Hospital and its closing was imminent. Recognizing that the NWHRC was nonetheless an important useful resource, Battaglino and two of her colleagues developed a marketing strategy to take over the NWHRC and maintain it working — a plan that paved the way in which for HealthyWomen to come back into existence. Because the small however mighty workforce of ladies labored to maintain the NWHRC afloat, they acquired a name from representatives at Johnson and Johnson who needed to be taught extra concerning the group and the way the 2 corporations may 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 bold 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 life-style manufacturers and magazines and well being editors. This led to partnerships with manufacturers like Prevention and Mattress, Tub & Past.
As time and know-how superior, the NWHRC transitioned into the web house by turning into the primary ever web site that comprehensively addressed girls’s well being and wellness points, and in 2009, it rebranded as HealthyWomen. Since then, the positioning was acknowledged by Forbes Journal as a prime web site for girls three years in a row, and Oprah Journal acknowledged the positioning as its prime girls’s well being web site in 2010.
Over time, Battaglino’s position at HealthyWomen has advanced, and he or she turned CEO in 2006, positioning HealthyWomen because the go-to well being useful resource for girls.
For greater than three a long time, girls have relied on HealthyWomen’s extremely researched and dependable data to have interaction, educate and empower them.
It’s been an honor to be a company that girls depend on — and one the HealthyWomen workforce hasn’t taken evenly at any time in our historical past.
Take heed to our CEO speak extra concerning the historical past and evolution of HealthyWomen.
