By Alyssa Figueroa, Campaigns Coordinator

In just 5 days, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, or as we like to call it, Breast Cancer Industry Month will be upon us. Store shelves are already filling up with pink ribbon products, and it will only get worse come October 1^st. Companies will be trying to gain customer loyalty and increase their sales by pinkifying their merchandise.

We need your help this Pinktober to make the breast cancer movement more accountable to women by exposing companies that are pinkwashing—and the organizations that are enabling them. Pinkwashing is a term we coined back in 2002 as part of our Think Before You Pink® campaign to describe when a company claims to care about women with breast cancer but is selling products that can increase our risk of the disease.

Sure, corporations have a lot of money, but there’s one thing they don’t have that we do: people power. You helped us get rGBH out of 2/3rds of the dairy industry. You helped us end pink drill bits “for the cure.” And you’ve helped us completely change the national conversation about pink ribbon marketing.

Stay tuned next week for the specifics of this year’s campaign, and here’s what you can do right now to make sure we have the people power to challenge pinkwashing this October:

• Like us on Facebook: Get ready to “like” and share our posts with your friends
• Follow us on Twitter:  Be prepared to retweet us and use our campaign hashtag
• Tell your friends to sign up for our emails: Make sure your family and friends are in-the-know about our campaign when we launch at the beginning of October

The best way to prep for the month-long pink parade is to get ready to use the power we have as a community to make change. We truly can’t make a difference without you.