Mobile Diagnostic Services (MDS) provides breast cancer screening services to uninsured Masachusetts women. It is the only such provider to "medically underserved" communities.

MDS began operating in 1987, as a profit company working mostly with corporations and insured women. It soon discovered that lack of awareness, inconvenience, and cost were impeding participation in screening programs, especially in low-income communities. By 1990, 10% of its work focused on "medically underserved" communities, where it found that 47% of its clients were having their first mammograms. Today 72% of MDS' work is in these communities, and the percentage of first mammograms is now down to the overall average of 25%. MDS now screens more than 3,000 uninsured women annually statewide--from Springfield to Roxbury to Cape Cod. It has established collaborations with the State Department of Public Health and the American Cancer Society, as well as with neighborhood health centers, churches, shelters for homeless and battered women, councils on aging, and visiting nurse associations.

Medicare and state programs do not cover the added costs of bringing mobile mammography to neighborhoods. Therefore in 1995 MDS incorporated as a benefit corporation to enable it to raise charitable contributions for its work with medically underserved communities. It has established a brief but solid track-record of grants from major foundations, but this cannot last and MDS needs to develop a long-term funding strategy. The purpose of this entry in the Catalogue is to test whether, and to what degree, individual donations can support this unique and indisputably valuable work.