Ysabel Duron

Ysabel Duron is a pioneering, award-winning Latina journalist, a cancer survivor, and for the last 23 years, a leading patient activist around Latino community engagement. Her encore career as a cancer patient advocate and non-profit agency builder commenced when she was diagnosed with cancer in 1999.

This past February President Joe Biden appointed Duron to the National Cancer Advisory Board which advises the Director of the National Cancer Institute. She is the first patient advocate to serve on the NCAB.

Duron describes her “work in and with community,” as a learning classroom and credits the experience with preparing her for her advocacy role. Among other things, her former agency developed programs for low income, Spanish-speaking and immigrant communities to address gaps along the cancer continuum including cancer awareness education, navigation into screening, psychosocial support groups and a lay community navigator program to support and guide low income, Spanish-speaking cancer patients in the public health care system in Santa Clara County (San Jose), California.

Between 2008 and 2016, under her leadership at Latinas Contra Cancer (LCC), Duron  convened 5 unique National Latino Cancer Summits, turning its lens on cancer issues in the Latino community, collaborating with advocacy groups, researchers and health care providers to investigate, and address cancer related impacts.

LCC also created linguistically and culturally appropriate education tools using a bingo game model to dispel myth and misinformation, promote healthy eating and exercise as well as screening and early detection; training up to 200 promotores aka community health workers to use these tools to raise awareness and navigate eligible participants into screenings.  This bingo concept was adapted for the African American and Pacific Islander communities, and cited by the NIEHS – IBCERCC Committee, on which Duron served, in the 2012 Breast Cancer and the Environment, Prioritizing Prevention Report.

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