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Local activist to receive award
Annie Hall of Youngstown has received dozens of awards for community service.
YOUNGSTOWN — Local community activist Annie Hall is going to have to make some additional room on the walls and tabletops that hold her many awards for community service.
Hall, 78, has been selected to receive the Ohio Governor’s Humanitarian Award presented by the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Commission.
She will receive the award during a ceremony Thursday at the Riffe Center Capitol Theatre in Columbus.
Molly O’Reilly, Ohio Department of Administrative Services, said the award honors an individual each year who is committed to King’s six principles of nonviolence. Recipients must have given of their time and services independently of any agency and without recognition.
“This award recognizes the quiet soldiers who promote the welfare of humanity and elimination of pain and suffering through their own selfless service,” she said.
For Hall, who has been active in community service in the Mahoning Valley for more than two decades, the award comes as a pleasant surprise.
“I had no idea that my name had been turned in as a candidate for the award until after I received the letter last week. I was stunned, and feel so good now about the whole thing,” she said.
Hall said she has received dozens of awards for community service over the years — so many that she is running out of room to display them. She will, however, make room for yet another acknowledgement for her consistent community service.
She started in community service with the implementation of block watch groups on Youngstown’s East Side in 1982.
“We started the first block watch, and then everyone wanted to join in. We had more than 80 block watches at that time — all of them were active and efficient,” she said.
For more than 17 years, Hall and a group of additional volunteers have taken several city police cars to neighborhoods and housing developments in the city and Campbell to pass out candy to waiting young people on Halloween.
She has volunteered at the Gleaners Food Bank on Pyatt Street. She also has distributed food and clothes from a building at the corner of Oak and Fruit streets on the East Side to those most in need of the items.
Hall said she is proud of all the work she has done in the community, but is most proud of the work she has done with the “National Night Out: A March Against Crime” in Youngstown.
“That was something I just wanted to do for the city. That was just always a big thing for me,” she said.
jgoodwin@vindy.com