The month of October is nationally known as breast cancer awareness month. At Burke, DECA, a marketing-based club, creates different projects through the year in support of various charities and foundations. This year, Senior Burke DECA students Taya Baker and Nicole Cogua focused their project on raising money for cancer research by selling t-shirts for Burke’s Pink-out football game that was on Oct 15.

When deciding on what to do for their project, Cogua and Baker knew that they wanted to create shirts, and also that they wanted to support a good cause.

“I think I had remembered that we did them in the past, like a couple years ago and sold them, and I was like, ‘let’s just do them for pink out game,’  because it’ll probably be the easiest because we can find something easy for people to support,” Baker said.

During the week of the pink out football game, Cogua and Baker sold pink t-shirts during lunch. These shirts were hand-printed by the pair with a design approved by DECA Sponsor Mr. Dalton. The process of creating the T-shirts is more complicated than it appears to be. Cogua describes the process of coming up with a design for it to be printed on the shirts.

“Before we could even bring it up to Mr. Dalton, we had to come up with a template for it because he likes stuff written out. So, we came up with a design for the shirt, like a little mock up and showed it to him and explained what we wanted to do,” Cogua said. “He edited our shirt to make it a little pinker and then we had to go to Stogdill and get it approved by her. After that, we finally finalized the shirt.”

The most important part of the project was selecting the charity that the proceeds were to go to. Cogua and Baker had to decide what foundation to pick from, weighing which one they felt was the most reputable. It was very important to Nicole and Taya that the organization  they chose was both well known and trustworthy.

“Some foundations do have a reputation of pocketing money, so we wanted to make sure that that wasn’t something that was going to happen and since Susan G. Komen had the best reputation, we just had to go with that,” Cogua said. “One of the things with breast cancer is that it’s most likely to come back, so they’re using the money for research to find out how they can eliminate that, so that somebody doesn’t have to go through that twice.”

As well as filling the student section with a sea of pink, the shirt sales raised over 2,000 dollars for the Susan G Komen foundation. Baker and Cogua presented a check to Jennifer Redmond, a representative of the foundation.