Junior Achievement gets grant from Sam’s Club

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Neighbors | Submitted .Sam's Club employees, from left, Doug Duncan and Steve Lucente presented Junior Achievement Mahoning Valley President Michele Merkel with a check for $8,000. The grant was awarded as part of Sam's Club's Giving Made Simple campaign.

The Junior Achievement of Mahoning Valley won an $8,000 grant from Sam’s Club as part of the Giving Made Simple campaign. The grant is part of $500,000 received by Junior Achievement USA and shared among its local offices that demonstrated the most effort in terms of driving votes during the month-long campaign.

The Giving Made Simple campaign ran from April 8 to May 2 and more than 125,000 Sam’s Club members and associates voted to determine how $4 million in charitable giving would be distributed among eight nonprofit organizations.

The organizations were divided into two categories, education and entrepreneurship, and only competed with the organizations in their categories. The Sam Club members and associates were able to vote for their favorite organizations online and during a one-day in-club event.

Additionally, Sam’s Club engaged members and the general public on Twitter by inviting them to show their support for their favorite organization during two special bonus-voting days, and by giving everyone the chance to chat real-time with the eight organizations via an online Twitter party.

Throughout the event, Junior Achievement was able to rally its supporters to generate the most online votes throughout the contest and to post the most Tweets among the education nonprofits during each of the two special bonus-voting days.

“Sam’s Club is pleased to award $500,000 to Junior Achievement and thanks all of the organizations who participated in Giving Made Simple, and our members and associates for helping to make this campaign such a success,” said Cindy Davis, executive vice president, Membership, Marketing and E-commerce at Sam’s Club.

The grant will allow the youth development nonprofit to expand its entrepreneurship programs to reach 6,800 more middle grades and high school students nationally, including 160 in the Mahoning Valley.