Longtime breast cancer advocate and survivor Floriene Lieberman has been chosen to receive the eighth annual Richard A. Bloch Cancer Survivorship Award.
“I am delighted to be honoring Floriene this year,” said Annette Bloch, president and co-founder of the R.A. Bloch Cancer Foundation. “She had done so much to help women with breast cancer, and she was right there with Dick and me as we were getting our foundation started.”
Annette Bloch will present the award to Lieberman on National Cancer Survivors Day — Sunday, June 2 — at the 28th annual Kansas City Celebration of Life Rally in the Richard & Annette Cancer Survivors Park, just west of the Country Club Plaza.
Lieberman’s cancer was diagnosed in 1976, well before many advances in breast cancer treatment that have raised the survival statistics, and she had a recurrence three years later. Doctors she meets tell her one thing, she says: You shouldn’t still be alive.
Her involvement in breast cancer causes is both long and deep. Many local women say she’s one of the first people they called after being diagnosed — their own “first responder.” And long ago, she got her own toll-free phone number so women who needed her help could call without running up their phone bills.
Lieberman was a charter member in 1997 of the Greater Kansas City Community Advisory Council of the Kansas Cancer Institute, and she serves or has served on many cancer-related KU boards. They include the Dr. Roy Jensen Cancer Advisory Board, the Kansas Masonic Cancer Research Institute Advisory Board, the Comprehensive Breast Cancer Advisory Board and the KU School of Medicine’s Executive Dean’s Advisory Board.
She believes her work with KU Medical Center helped it win designation by the National Cancer Institute as a Comprehensive Cancer Center, and she considers it one of her greatest achievements.
During the 25 years she spent on the board of councilors for the Menorah Medical Center Auxiliary, she created B.E.S.T. (Breast Examination Self Teaching), a pioneering program for early detection of breast cancer.
She has been president of the board of the American Cancer Society’s Johnson County unit (1989-90) and is a past member of the ACS Kansas state board and state nominating committee. She also has served on the board of the Greater Kansas City Affiliate of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation (1999) and its disbursement committee (1995-98), and in 2000 she was chairman of Johnson County’s Community Advisory Board for Breast Cancer.
Lieberman’s long list of honors includes the Jefferson Award, presented by the American Institute for Public Service; the Courage Award, presented by the National ACS; the Kansas Division winner of the Public Education Lifesaver Hall of Fame Award, the Bea Johnson Award from the ACS’ Johnson County unit, and Susan B. Komen Local Hero (1997) and Honorary Hero (1998).
For more information about the award or the Celebration of Life Rally, contact Rosanne Wickman, organizing chair for the event, at 816-854-4364 or .