Yorktown to "Paint the Town Purple" and Fight Cancer

Yorktown residents and business owners will help transform the town purple to honor local cancer survivors and raise awareness for cancer during the annual "Paint the Town Purple Day" on Friday. 

The American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life of Yorktown event committee members and volunteers will be decorating the streets and sidewalks of Yorktown with purple balloons, decorations and Relay For Life banners.

Yorktown supervisor Michael Grace will officially proclaim the day at 9 a.m. on Friday, while Yorktown Athletic Club cheerleaders will be on hand to cheer on the crowd. 

Children, teachers, administrators and staff members in the  will also be able to contribute to the events as they create messages of home and write the names of cancer survivors or those lost to the disease on a piece of paper. Each piece of paper will be joined into a long chain – "Chain of Hope" – which will be proudly paraded at the Relay For Life on June 8 at the Jack DeVito Field. 

During the second annual  (next to Town Hall) at 3 p.m. there will be a special dedication of a purple flowering tree in honor of Relay For Life.

To wrap up the day’s events, the second season of the "Dancing with the Yorktown Stars" fundraiser will take place at . The event will spotlight several of Yorktown’s prominent residents paired with dance pros from local dance companies. for a video of one of the final rehearsals. 

"These Paint the Town Purple activities are designed to get the community excited about the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life of Yorktown," said Monican Carrigan, a Yorktown resident and senior director of special events for the American Cancer Society.

Relay For Life is an overnight community celebration where teams of family, friends and co-workers camp out, listen to bands, take part in fun activities and games, take turns walking or running around a track "relay" style to raise money to fight cancer. 

The evening begins with a dinner reception for cancer survivors and their caregivers. At nightfall, participants will light thousands of luminary candles around the track in a moving ceremony, which honors cancer survivors and remembers those lost to the disease.

At relay, we CELEBRATE cancer survivors, REMEMBER those lost to cancer and FIGHT BACK against a disease that has taken too much from all of us. American Cancer Society is the official sponsor of Birthdays. Just by being a part of Relay For Life, Yorktown is helping to create a world with less cancer and more birthdays. 11 million cancer survivors will celebrate a birthday this year. That is a sign of progress and proof that a world with more birthdays is possible.