It’s October and you know what that means… we’re being inundated with pink!
A few months ago I wrote a post on pinkwashing, and have continued to be selective in my purchase of pink ribbon products. I have to admit, the sheer volume and variety of pink products worn by 3-Day walkers can generate some serious pink ribbon envy. Still, I had to wonder how much of the revenue from those products actually make it to breast cancer programs? I was thinking about this last weekend during a trip to Target and decided, just for fun, to stop and take pictures of the pink products I ran across, and read the packaging to see if I could tell how much money is being donated to which organizations.
Turns out there seem to be three primary beneficiaries of these programs – The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, The National Breast Cancer Foundation, Inc. and Susan G. Komen for the Cure. For some reason I thought there’d be more. When the packaging didn’t spell it out, I figured I’d look online to see if there was more information on the company web sites. After digging a bit I was able to find some, even more so on two of the three non-profit organization sites (see below). On a lark, I decided to call or email several of the companies (including one very, very large company) and was pleasantly surprised at how responsive they were to my request for additional information.
That initial trip and a subsequent trip to the grocery store have generated enough photos for a series of posts that I’ll start tomorrow. I’m calling it PinkWatch, and would love suggestions for interesting products to feature.
Here are the non-profit partner links I found:
- The Breast Cancer Research Foundation partner program details
- Susan G. Komen for the Cure partner program details
- National Breast Cancer Foundation, Inc. has a partner list, and some promotion detail
