September is closing out with Parents & Families Weekend, and once again the Women’s Center is putting on its beloved Chocolate Festival to ensure the kickoff is as sweet as possible.
The Women’s Center’s annual Chocolate Festival will be held on Friday, Sept. 28, from 5:30-7 p.m. in Talley Student Union. Attendees have the opportunity to try out samples of sweets from a variety of vendors, bid in silent auctions and participate in educational activities. All of the event’s proceeds are split between the Women’s Center and Kay Yow Cancer Fund.
The Chocolate Festival has occurred annually since 2003 in honor of the many staff and alumni of NC State afflicted by breast cancer, most notably the 1998-1999 student body president Jenny Chang and former women’s basketball team coach Kay Yow – both of whom lost their lives to breast cancer.
A few years after it was founded in 2007, the Kay Yow Cancer Fund started receiving portions of the profits from the Chocolate Festival to fund grants for cancer research across the nation, from labs as close as Rex Hospital in Raleigh to as far as the Oregon Health and Science University.
“In the beginning, the majority of the fund went to the Women’s Center,” said Kimberly Zugay, the Business Services Coordinator of the Office for Institutional Equity and Diversity. “It wasn’t until a few years later that they made that connection to the Kay Yow Cancer Fund.”
Zugay, who was part of Parents & Families Services before joining OIED, is helping organize the Chocolate Festival for her sixth year in a row. Since she started, Zugay has witnessed the Kay Yow Cancer Fund develop a deeper relationship with the festival.
“Before, we just gave them a portion of the proceeds,” Zugay said. “Now we actually invite them in, have them come to the festival and help us do pre-planning over the summer, then they advertise it through their channels. We’ve tried to make it more of a ‘breast cancer’ event than a ‘chocolate’ event.”
The Chocolate Festival has grown exponentially since its conception, from averaging 200-300 attendees each year to over 1200, marking an increase of at least 300 percent.
Despite the influx of people, there’s certainly no shortage of food. According to Janine Kossen, an associate director of the OIED, plenty of stores, restaurants and bakeries around the Triangle have vendors at the festival. Featured will be Sherry’s Signature Cheesecakes, Gigi’s Cupcakes, and a chocolate fountain sponsored by Rave!.
A variety of education-based vendors from NC State will also be present at the event, as mentioned by K Stone, the program assistant at OIED.
“Along with the chocolate vendors, we also do outreach for educational vendors and student organizations,” Stone said. “This year, we have the Muslim Students’ Association, the Inter-Residence Council, along with the counseling center reaching out with their Mental Health Ambassadors.”
Each of the educational vendors will have interactive sessions for attendees to participate in, and Parents & Families Services will be present, too, with a table for visitors. Kossen spoke about how the festival provides businesses with way to engage families.
“It’s a great opportunity for local businesses to have something donated to the silent auction to show off their work,” Kossen said. “It engages families in the local community so it’s not just [the Women’s Center] doing the outreach. There were also quite a few people that weren’t in positions to donate but still wanted to volunteer to help us put on the event.”
By Sept. 25, there were over 80 volunteers registered for the Chocolate Festival.
“There’s a lot of steps that have to be taken,” Kossen said. “We, obviously, are a small staff and so we rely on the generosity of our volunteers from the community and from campus to help us bring to fruition this massive undertaking.”
The silent auction features an item selection that makes it clear the visiting families were in mind, including hotel stays, dinner reservations at restaurants and plenty of NC State merchandise such as autographed footballs, stadium jackets and artwork.
The option to buy tickets for the chocolate sampling closed Wednesday evening, though there are still many other booths open to the public. Any tickets remaining from online sales will be sold at the door for $15, so last-minute attendees still have a chance to try the vendors’ samples. Even without a ticket for the tastings, the silent auction and other tables set up at the event are open to everyone who comes by the festival.
