United Way Hosts Annual Day of Caring Friday

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – As part of its centennial celebration, the United Way of Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley will host its annual Day of Caring Sept. 6.

The event is the largest in the chapter’s history, with more than 1,200 volunteers registered from 90 area businesses and organizations. 

A breakfast will be held at the Covelli Centre in downtown Youngstown at 8 a.m. before teams are dispatched to several sites across the city at 9:15. United Way President Bob Hannon will announce the organization’s annual fundraising campaign goal during the breakfast.

“In 1919, our founders set the foundation to ensure a positive future for the men, women and children of our Valley. I strongly believe they would be extremely proud to see how we are able to mobilize more than a thousand people to volunteer in just one day,” he said in a statement.

Most volunteers, 850 of them, will be working on Youngstown’s south side, in an area bordered by Glenwood Avenue, Oakhill Avenue, Cohasset Drive and Breaden Street. There, Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp. is partnering with The Salvation Army and Meridian Services for a community clean-up.

“[Our founders] would also be impressed with our strong collaboration with YNDC, City of Youngstown, and the American Red Cross to pull this massive undertaking off each year,” Hannon said. “For the last nine months we have been celebrating our past, and now we can confidently look to the future thanks to events like the Day of Caring where residents pull together to make generations of impact.”

New to the Day of Caring this year is a Red Cross blood drive, which will be held at Covelli Centre from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The agency will also help volunteers install smoke detectors in homes and replace traditional bulbs with LED lighting on exterior lights.

Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.