43
Mahoning Valley ranks high in drive to win $1M to beat hunger
YOUNGSTOWN
The Youngstown-Warren area has jumped from 22nd to sixth place in the Walmart Facebook Fighting Hunger Together campaign.
If the residents of Columbiana, Mahoning and Trumbull counties keep voting and more join them, the tri-county area has a realistic chance at winning the top prize of $1 million in grants from Walmart for food-distribution organizations.
“We are very grateful to everyone who is supporting the Youngstown area,” said Michael Iberis, executive director of Second Harvest Food Bank of the Mahoning Valley. “It is a great opportunity to feed more hungry people in the Mahoning Valley and to show the state and nation the tenacity of its people.”
People can vote daily on Facebook, and Iberis and Second Harvest, which supplies food-distribution organizations in the Mahoning Valley, urged residents to continue to vote each day to win the Facebook campaign and help address hunger in their respective communities.
With just nine days remaining in the Walmart Facebook campaign — it ends April 30 — Youngstown and Toledo are among the top-10 vote recipients of 200 eligible communities.
As of Friday night, the Youngstown area was in sixth place with about 3,750 votes. By comparison, in first place Friday was the Johnson City, Tenn., area with 12,675 votes.
The community that receives the most votes will receive $1 million in grants from the Walmart Foundation. The next 20 communities, which now include the Youngstown area, will each receive $50,000.
As part of Walmart’s Fighting Hunger Together initiative, the company chose 200 metro areas for its Facebook campaign where unemployment rates are the highest, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, making Youngstown- Warren eligible.
Facebook users can vote once per day for the community of their choice, and they need not live in the area for which they vote, said Miller.
For information, visit www.walmartstores.com/fightinghunger.