A “sea of pink” flooded the stands at the Grand Forks Central High School girl’s varsity volleyball team’s match Thursday, Oct. 24 against West Fargo Sheyenne High School.
Students wore pink t-shirts to show support for the school’s “Pinkout” event, the grand finale to “Pinkout Week,” an initiative of the school’s DECA club to raise funds for Altru’s Cancer Center patients and their families who are coping with breast cancer.
In the past five years, the club has raised more than $10,000, said Oliver Dalmi, a senior and DECA president at Grand Forks Central.
For Pinkout Week, DECA members sell pink t-shirts and other pink-themed items at the school and in the community.
They solicit support from local businesses for items to fill raffle baskets and sell tickets for those baskets, which, this year, include such things as movie tickets and a pink basketball signed by members of the GFC men’s basketball team, he said.
ADVERTISEMENT
DECA members also run the school’s store.
“We participate in state and nationwide competitive events in various fields of marketing and business, but a major portion of what we do is applying our skills and knowledge to helping the community,” Dalmi said.
The club did not set a specific fundraising goal for this project, he said, but “we are expecting it to be a major success.”
Leonard Kjelland, the DECA advisor at Grand Forks Central High School, is the new marketing teacher at the school. He took over for Kimberly Clark, who was a teacher and advisor to the club for “multiple decades,” Dalmi said.
The mission of the international organization, DECA, which stands for Distributive Education Clubs of America, is to prepare leaders and entrepreneurs for careers and education in marketing, finance, hospitality, management and other business areas.
