Kris Hallenga’s obituary

When Kris Hallenga, the founder of CoppaFeel! breast cancer awareness charity, she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer, she was 23. Things had moved very slowly at first, as doctors were sure her symptoms were harmless effects of the pill and hormonal changes; once cancer was suspected, very quickly, as they rushed to discover its extent.

But almost immediately they discovered there was secondary cancer in her spine, and everything came to a standstill. The questions changed, she said in an interview three years ago. They became: “’What is most important as you see it? Pain. Okay, let’s fix the pain.’ At that point it is palliative care.”

Hallenga, who has died aged 38, was stunned by her terminal diagnosis. It became her mission to make other young women aware that such a thing was possible, to familiarize them with the symptoms and to spread an everyday vigilance so that everyone would know what was “normal for them”.

She did this, often with her twin sister Maren, always with friends, later with other women who had been diagnosed at a young age, at festivals, schools, colleges, clubs and universities, on social and traditional media. Once the sisters’ charity, CoppaFeel!had found its target, 1 million young people per year would receive a text message reminding them to check their breasts.

She was born in Lower Saxony, to a German father, Reiner Hallenga, who died when she was twenty, and an English mother, Jane, both teachers. At the age of nine, following their parents’ divorce, Kris, Maren and their older sister, Maike, moved with their mother to Daventry, Northamptonshire. Kris left the local grammar school with dreams of becoming a flight attendant and started working for a travel company, moving to Beijing while teaching English on the side.

In 2009 she returned to the Midlands to gain some teaching qualifications. Although her doctor wasn’t concerned about her symptoms, her mother was: Hallenga’s grandmother had had breast cancer before she was 30, in the 1950s.

Once she was given her grim prognosis, Hallenga’s immediate response was fierce energy, she later recalled: She was in the middle of her first, very aggressive chemotherapy when she started CoppaFeel! at a festival, “in the middle of a field, without hair, but with eyebrows”, handing out stickers and starting conversations.

She won a Pride of Britain award that year, which saw her attend a Downing Street reception and meet Sarah Brown, wife of then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whom she always credited with speeding up the process of getting the Charity Commission to to get them sign up for CoppaFeel! In 2018 it was the third most recognized cancer charity for young adults in Britain.

There was an element of displacement activity early on, she said. “When someone is diagnosed with breast cancer, it’s almost like there’s a silence or a gap or a moment that needs to be filled because it’s so hard and so tragic. The cancer patient usually feels like he has to fill it, and he has to say, “It’s okay,” when it’s not. I gave my friends something to do. I needed them to help with the charity, they all said ‘Brilliant’.”

The charity gained momentum: text reminders, mass media campaigns such as the partnership with the Sun newspaper in 2014, school visits by the Boobettes, a growing network of young women with cancer. In 2018, the charity made significant progress in its campaign for cancer education in schools with the government’s announcement that health education would become a compulsory part of the curriculum, with pupils learning “the benefits of regular self-examination”.

The year before, Hallenga was behind the first ever daytime TV ad showing a female nippleand was particularly proud of getting images of nipples on billboards for the first time.

She wrote columns for the Northampton Echo and the Sun and had an open, personal style that was powerfully persuasive. Throughout the period she underwent treatments that were sometimes completely debilitating; the cancer in her spine required particularly grueling surgery, and symptomless tumors in her liver and brain often showed up on routine scans. Her oncologist always called them ‘dead pigeons’.

She resigned as CEO of CoppaFeel! in 2017, to move to Cornwall, near Maren. It was from Newquay that she wrote her memoirs, A turd glistening, which was published in 2021 and became a bestseller. She also took part in twin studies at Kings College London and liaised with Tim Spector about the lack of nutritional advice for cancer patients. Maren’s son Herbie was born in 2019 and Kris loved spending time with him.

Although she had distanced herself from her charity, she remained deeply motivated by its work and by her determination to share its message as widely as possible. It was to this that she partially attributed her longevity after her diagnosis: Although she purposefully did not look for survival statistics, she often found that oncologists were surprised by how well she survived.

She said that every new project and idea “boosted every cell in my body. Every cell thinks: ‘We have to stay for this.’”

She leaves behind her mother, Maren and Maike.