Pink drop-boxes located on campus for the next month are part of a USF sorority chapter’s breast cancer awareness and education fundraiser.

The boxes house Yoplait pink yogurt lids to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Foundation and the Zeta Tau Alpha national organization, said Stephanie Baer, a sophomore majoring in marketing who is the service chair for ZTA.

ZTA has partnered with Yoplait since 2004 in the “Save Lids to Save Lives” program.

The boxes are in the Marshall Student Center, Fresh Food Company, Juniper and Bulls Den dining halls, the College of Business and the College of Engineering, she said.

Baer said the boxes will remain on campus until the end of October, which is breast cancer awareness month.

“We want the whole community to collect the pink yogurt lids,” Baer said.

For every lid collected, 10 cents is donated to the Komen foundation and an additional 5 cents is donated to the ZTA foundation, Baer said.

Last year, ZTA collected 10,910 lids and raised approximately $16,000, Baer said.

The fundraiser reminds ZTA’s Philanthropy Chair Sanum Zaidi of her mother’s experience with breast cancer.

Zaidi’s mom discovered a small lump in her chest and decided to get medical attention for it.

“She didn’t have a lump you could see. Sometimes it’s not obvious,” said Zaidi, a sophomore majoring in biomedical sciences. “She went to the doctor and got it checked out and it was cancerous.”

Zaidi’s mother “luckily” caught her lump early and had it removed with radiation therapy, Zaidi said. However, some people are not that lucky, she said.

The fundraiser has also become a competition among ZTA chapters nationwide for who collects the most lids, Baer said. The USF ZTA chapter has come in second nationwide for the past two years and first in Florida.

Baer said ZTA partnered with USF Athletics to advertise the fundraiser and pass out pink ribbons at games. The first scheduled game is USF’s women’s soccer match against Providence on Oct. 9.

ZTA Philanthropy Co-Chair and sophomore Caitlin Costa, a psychology major, hopes the lid drive will become a campus-wide effort.

“We want this to be a whole USF event where everyone can participate in some way and help us further our effort to make people more aware and educated on breast cancer,” Costa said.