Workers praised for food drive

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, December 7, 1999

Nancy Clingman praised the city of Austin for helping collect more than a ton of food for the Salvation Army’s Austin corps to distribute to the hungry.

Tuesday, December 07, 1999

Nancy Clingman praised the city of Austin for helping collect more than a ton of food for the Salvation Army’s Austin corps to distribute to the hungry.

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Clingman also touched the collective conscience of her audience at Monday night’s regular meeting of the Austin City Council.

Each fall, Mower County employees make a friendly challenge to city workers to collect the most non-perishable food items for distribution by the Salvation Army.

The competition began seven years ago and for the first six years, the county has collected the most on three occasions and the city on the other three occasions.

This year, Mower County employees donated 825 pounds of food and city employees donated 1,177 for a combined total of 2,002 pounds.

The ton of food was the most raised by the two local governments in the seven-year history of the competition. Each unit set individual records for raising more food this year. The county’s total was 251 pounds more than a year ago. The city more than doubled its 1998 total – 1,177 compared to 513 in 1998.

The resulting 2,002 pounds of food also nearly doubled 1998’s combined total of 1,087 pounds.

In the seven-year history of the friendly challenge, city and county employees have raised 6,880 pounds of food.

While the totals were impressive, so was the message delivered by Clingman, an employee at the Mower County Recycling Center.

According to statistics assembled by Clingman, 24,000 people die every day from hunger-related causes in the United States. "Three-fourths of the people are children under the age of 5," she said.

"An estimated 14 million children in American are hungry or at the very edge of hunger, because their families lack the money to buy sufficient food," she said.

"The need continues for healthy meals for families and this is what initially prompted the Mower County Employee Relations Committee campaign to help reduce these numbers in our local area and to provide a food basket at a time where our spirits are rather high and for many it is a time of distress," she said.

Austin Mayor Bonnie Rietz praised Clingman for her "interest and fervor" in conducting the campaign and also for the statistics about hunger in America.