Every spring the Safeway Foundation focuses on Cancer as one of a dozen causes it cares about. Safeway customers make generous donations at the point of sale in their local Safeway stores in Northern California. For the past 12 years the NorCal Safeway Foundation has considered requests for funding to support the vision of Zero Breast Cancer and generously contributed a total of over $146,000 to date.

Over the most recent funding cycles, the Safeway Foundation and Safeway customers' donations have benefitted programming that has focused on breast cancer risk reduction in the next generation. Significant support has already been provided towards the creation of several key elements of the ZBC Girls’ New Puberty campaign: Infographics, YouTube videos in English, Spanish and Chinese and a microsite. This campaign is based on scientific evidence that lifelong health and wellness, starting in the earliest years of a girl's life, forms a key foundation for long-term breast cancer risk reduction behaviors. To run such a campaign requires understanding the target audience, developing engaging information and education materials, optimizing these to be delivered on the appropriate mobile platforms and translating them into a variety of languages spoken in our service area.

How will the partnership make an impact?

Zero Breast Cancer is incredibly excited to announce that for 2019-2020 Safeway customers and the Safeway Foundation has raised and allocated sufficient funds to allow ZBC to adopt and adapt digital marketing techniques such as email campaigns and use of appropriate social media platforms to raise awareness of the underlying issues (that breast cancer risk reduction has the greatest impact when it is lifelong). Such an approach has the added benefit of enabling real-time, accurate collection and analysis of the reach of these materials for evaluation and improvement. ZBC’s target audiences are racially and ethnically diverse, low income individuals and communities with limited access to health education and information to help them guide and encourage the healthy development of the young girls in their communities.

What is the Safeway Foundation?

The Safeway Foundation’s mission is to

“support causes that impact our customers’ lives. Our stores provide the opportunity to mobilize funding and create awareness in our neighborhoods through our employees’ passion, partnerships with our vendors and the generous contributions by our customers.

Carefully directing contributions, we work in collaboration with local organizations and seek to improve the quality of life in the communities we serve. We take pride in ensuring that the vast majority of the funds we raise stays in local communities and reflects what is important to our customers and employees.”

Blog written by Rose Barlow, Executive Director of Zero Breast Cancer.