Zeta Tau Alpha raises over $7,000

By Brannagh Rattigan

During their annual Mr. Pink pageant, Zeta Tau Alpha raised over $7,000 toward their national philanthropy, the breast cancer education, awareness and research foundation.

Hosted by ZTA in partnership with the American Cancer Society and Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Mr. Pink is a charity pageant in which social fraternity members compete to be crowned “Mr. Pink,” although this year included more than just Interfraternity Council and National Panhellenic Conference participants.

Senior ZTA president and digital marketing major, Presley Balmer, shares the significance of having participants outside of IFC and NPC.

“We tried to get much more engagement and include everyone, as opposed to just focusing solely on NPC and IFC,” Balmer said. “We had a [Delta Sigma Pi] participant this year, which was something different, and we invited anyone from any chapter to participate.”

Leading up to the pageant, ZTA’s philanthropy committee focused on creating more promotional activity to gain more fundraising.

“We have increased a lot of our promotional activities toward the events and did a lot more to raise hype and awareness about the events,” Balmer said. “[The philanthropy committee] were pretty tactical in planning a week of activities for the boys to do before competing in the pageant.” 

Their most notable method of fundraising was a dare board; each contestant was set up with a personal fundraising page through Crowd Change, which made it easy for them to personally promote themselves to people in their lives. 

Senior business administration major Stella Crowley is the community service chairman of the philanthropy committee. She additionally expressed the success of the dare board and staying modern with      fundraising ideas.

“We have a lot of new ideas for next year, but the dare board specifically is something we’ll definitely be keeping because it was so successful,” Crowley said.

In all of their promotional events and the pageant itself, ZTA was able to raise a significant amount of money to put toward their philanthropy, which Balmer shared to be very personal to each sister.

“It’s important to our sisters because number one, we’re an organization of women, so it’s nice to support a cause that is so relevant to women and will impact our futures to keep us educated and safe,” Balmer said. “A lot of us have personal connections and our families and friends have been impacted by breast cancer, so it’s nice to all collectively be working toward a cause that has impacted us all in some way or another.”

Crowley shared a similar sentiment toward being able to fundraise such a notable cause as their national philanthropy. 

“I think it’s super impactful being able to raise money for a cause that affects so many. Just the hope that one day there is a cure and the fact that I’m able to be even a very small part of that is very rewarding,” Crowley said.

Beyond Mr. Pink, ZTA does activities all month long in October to raise awareness to the ZTA foundation, which supports the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

They began the month with Flags for Fighters, where they decorated the campus mall with miniature pink flags, forming the shape of the breast cancer ribbon.

Additionally, every day of October, ZTA is tabling outside of the Student Recreation Center from 11 p.m. to 1 p.m., where they collect donations.

Samantha Clark is the Vice President of Philanthropy and Service for ZTA. Clark had no part in the writing or editing of this story.