WILSON, NC — Vick Family Farms hopes to sell 50,000 boxes of sweet potatoes in special pink Breast Cancer Awareness cartons this month to benefit a local breast cancer project. “We’re being ambitious, but we’ve had a great response to date,” said Charlotte D. Vick, partner and director of sales and marketing for the grower. October is Breast Cancer Awareness month.

Charlotte VickLast fall, Vick Farms sold 24,000 40-pound boxes of its Pure Gold brand sweet potatoes and donated 10 cents a box to WilMed Healthcare Foundation in Wilson so uninsured poor women could get free mammograms and follow-up health care. With additional donations from some of its wholesale and retail customers, Vick Farms raised about $5,000 for the WilMed Foundation.

This year, Vick’s goal is to more than double its BCA box sales, and to also get matching donations from its customers. “So far, nobody has said no,” Vick noted. “We’ve got 100 percent support from our customers.” Each pink box sold has a brochure for store displays that tells about the BCA mammograms program.

Vick told The Produce News she chose WilMed Healthcare Foundation, soon to become the Healthcare Foundation of Wilson, for the fundraising project because she wanted the money to stay in the community and to help local residents. Vick hopes other organizations will see the information and become inspired to start similar programs in their towns. Since the mammogram program started in 2004, more than 1,300 free screenings have been offered and more than 500 additional tests administered. A Pink Ladies group with eight members was formed to administer the program and now has more than 100 volunteers.

Jerome Vick, father of Charlotte and owner of Vick Family Farms, is on the board of WilMed, which recently became part of Duke University’s LifePoint subsidiary. Vick Family Farms has been named the North Carolina Family Farm of the Year, and has also been home to the North Carolina and National Young Farmer of the Year.

Vick Family Farms also received earlier this year the Double Gold Star award from the North Carolina Department of Labor in recognition of Jerome Vick’s “efforts to provide safe, healthy farmworker housing.”