October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, this means that there will be numerous events and fundraisers happening throughout metro Detroit.
On Saturday, October 8 The Pink Fund will be holding the 4th Annual Dancing With The Survivors event. There will be great food, and the drinks will be plentiful. The highlight of the evening is the dance performances from breast cancer survivors. The dancers have been practicing ballroom dancing at Fred Astaire studios to get prepared for their performance.
The five dancers have had a personal battle with breast cancer. One of the women is dancing with her two sons, another is dancing in honor of her mother who had breast cancer. Each dancer are required to raise $3,000 to help another person going through treatment. If you want to learn more about each of the dancers you can find their bios on the Dancing With The Survivors website (you can also donate money to each of the dancers there as well.)
If you are interested in going to Dancing With the Survivors tickets are $150 per person. Proceeds will go towards helping those going through treatment for breast cancer.
The Pink Fund was started by Molly MacDonald in 2006 as a way to help women pay their bills while they were being treated for breast cancer. MacDonald was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, and soon found herself in financial turmoil. Her house was about to be foreclosed on, her utilities were overdue, and she was feeding her family with food from one of the local food banks.
One day she started thinking about the other women seeking cancer treatment. If she was having problems paying her bills, others must be as well.
“I met a lot of working women when I was in treatment, and they had a lot more aggressive cancer treatments than I had.” said MacDonald, “They were worried. When you loose your job and loose your income on top of that you feel pretty helpless. It was then that I couldn’t get any help for me, so I had to switch my thinking what if I could give help.”
MacDonald started The Pink Fund as a way to help other women who were also struggling to pay their bills while being treated.
The Pink Fund pays the basic living expenses for up to 90 days and up to $3,000. Basic living expenses are considered; health insurance premiums, mortgage, rent payments, car payments, car insurance, and utilities. The money that goes towards the payments are paid directly to the creditors.
What started out as a small non-profit that helped women in Michigan in 2006. When Ford asked them to become partners with them for the Warriors in Pink in 2012 they expanded to help women and men throughout the United States.
Dancing With the Survivors will take place at the Silver Gardens Event Center at 24350 Southfield Road, Southfield, MI 48073.