Mission Breast Cancer Awareness and Eradication

"A lot of breast cancer nonprofits get a lot of money from the health industry, which means that we're sort of swimming against the tide," she says. The upside is that this stance is attractive to a lot of individual donors.

Brenner says that when the policy was first adopted, the organization made it known in its newsletter and it was covered in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute: "It was a big deal, and we got letters from people that said, 'Thank you. I wish I had a million dollars to give you,' and from other people that said, 'Are you out of your mind?'"