Project will focus on world hunger

Participants go without
food and perform service projects.

YOUNGSTOWN — Groups from three area churches are participating in this weekend’s World Vision’s 30-Hour Famine.

The project, which began Friday and continues today aims to raise awareness and funds to fight hunger globally.

During the fast, participants go without food (consuming only liquids), learn about world hunger and poverty, and perform service projects in their communities. Teens participate in groups through churches, schools, youth groups and civic organizations.

The area groups are:

UDamascus Friends Church, 28857 Walnut St., one of the top 30 fund-raising groups nationally, which involves 100 teens and 20 adults. Their service projects Saturday will be from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Rescue Mission of Mahoning Valley, 2246 Glenwood Ave., where 20 youth will clean and sort items; 9:30 a.m. to noon at Alliance Pregnancy Center, 127 E. State St., where six teens will clean and sort items; 9:30 a.m. to noon for corn picking at 8092 McCann Road in Salem, where 50 teens will pick field corn and take to a mill to raise money for World Vision; 9:30 a.m. to noon in Damascus, where 14 teens will remove siding from a house to be demolished to salvage the scrap; teens collecting donations for Alliance Pregnancy Center and The Way Station in Columbiana; and at Damascus church, seven teens cleaning church nursery toys, counting famine money, cleaning rooms and setting up for Break-the-Fast meal.

UBethel Lutheran Church, 425 Crestview Drive, Boardman. Thirty participants, working with Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, will gather donations to be auctioned at the Break-the-Fast event. Two other groups of teens will conduct a “grocery store challenge” in which they shop for nonperishable items. The group that buys more for the amount wins. All food will be donated to a food bank. Youths also will serve breakfast at 6 a.m. Saturday at Rescue Mission of the Mahoning Valley at 962 Martin Luther King Blvd.

USalem Community Fellowship Church, 1909 N. Ellsworth Ave., Salem. Youths will volunteer and visit with the elderly at Essex of Salem, a local nursing home, in Salem.

The area groups join with more than 4,300 Cleveland teens and hundreds of thousands of American youths participating in the 2008 project. Since 1992, the service project has raised more than $100 million.