Walmart Helps Locals Fight Against Hunger

Northwest Ohio is about to get some big help in the fight against hunger. Thanks to Walmart, two area non-profits will receive large checks today. Fifty thousand dollars in grants will be awarded today to those non-profits. Toledo finished 15th in the company’s ‘Fighting Hunger Together’ spring Facebook campaign. Spring usually shows a decrease in donations to food banks, making it difficult for them to provide to those who are facing food insecurity.

Read more at 13ABC.com

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Missouri’s First Walmart Neighborhood Market Opens in Springfield MO

There’s a new grocery option in southwest Springfield. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held Wednesday morning for the 41,000 square-foot Walmart Neighborhood Market at 3150 W. Republic Road. The company says the goal of the new stores is to offer easy access to groceries, prescriptions and home products. “This is the first neighborhood market we’re opening up in Missouri and we are actually opening up the second next week, so we’ll have two neighborhood markets right here in Springfield,” says Brandon Dixon, Walmart Regional Manager. “The first two in the Missouri.”

Read more at KSPR

Walmart Neighborhood Market

Agencies Share Plans for $1M WalMart Grant

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One million dollars is now in the hands of three local non-profit agencies.

Last month, Valley voters turned out in droves to put the area on top of WalMart’s Fighting Hunger Together Facebook campaign.

Nearly 200 communities with the highest unemployment rates throughout the U.S. competed for the grants. The Youngstown-Warren area won with 98,000 votes.

“It has just been amazing how much support the family and friends support each other,” said Matt Burke, WalMart marketing manager. “How they rallied together. We started off the campaign around 26th place, and then we rallied, of course, to win and that’s a tribute to the folks in the Mahoning Valley.”

“It was phenomenal, wasn’t it,” said Sandra Mathews, of Trumbull Mobile Meals. “It’s almost history making.”

According to Second Harvest Food Bank, 20 percent of the people in Columbiana, Mahoning and Trumbull counties live in food insecure households, meaning they do not have access to enough food for a healthy lifestyle.

Read more at WKBN

Wal-Mart Ups the Stakes In Its Supplier Sustainability Scorecard Program

Not very long ago, using the words “sustainable” and “Wal-Mart” in the same sentence might have been the punch line of a joke. The world’s largest retailer was not well known for its green-minded practices, and it probably would have ranked just behind Monsanto, Exxon Mobil, BP, and other eco-villains on the blacklists of environmentalists.

While Wal-Mart still takes heat in other arenas — notably gender parity in pay and labor relations — it has been starting to show signs of life on the environmental front, which, given the sheer size of the company, is good news. With more than 100,000 suppliers and $420 billion in revenue, Wal-Mart represents 3 percent of U.S. GDP. It’s the number-one player in the U.S. consumer-goods supply chain, so it wields a lot of clout when it comes to making demands on its suppliers.

As the old saying goes, when you sleep next to an elephant, you move when the elephant moves … at least, if you don’t want to get squashed.

Wal-Mart recently announced plans to expand its sustainability scorecard program, which it uses to rate and rank the green efforts of the companies in its supply chain. The program was launched in 2006, but at that time, it applied only to product packaging. The company had hoped to achieve a 5 percent improvement in its packaging waste generation in five years — a pretty modest goal.

But the program evolved from there. In 2009, the company broadened its supplier sustainability scorecard to 15 categories. The checklist, developed in conjunction with the Sustainability Consortium, in Tempe, Ariz., included questions about greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, product and ingredient safety, packaging, social issues, community outreach, materials efficiency and waste, materials and ingredients transparency, endangered species management (such as with wild-caught fish), labor issues and employee safety and wellness. The retailer ranked its suppliers’ responses according to “above target,” “at target,” and “below target” and gave each supplier a score for each category. It then used these category scores to arrive at a total sustainability score.

Read more at ThomasNet Industrial News Room

Two Hunger Relief Organizations Awarded $50,000 Total in Grants

Two hunger-relief organizations in Bakersfield have been awarded $50,000 total in grants from Walmart to split between them in the fight against hunger.

Walmart’s Fighting Hunger campaign had Facebook users vote on what they thought was the hungriest city in America, resulting in Bakersfield being in the top 21 and winning the grant. The Community Action Partnership of Kern will receive $40,000, and Golden Empire Gleaners will receive $10,000.

The two organizations were awarded their winnings based on the volume of food they provided for the community, according to a Walmart spokeswoman. Of the 200 communities Facebook users were able to vote for, the San Joaquin Valley took a total of $300,000 in grants from the competition.

Read more at the Bakersfield Californian

ISU Economists Study Iowa Communities 15 Years Before And After Wal-Mart

Control communities in the study — those without Wal-Mart stores — didn’t match the retail sales growth of the Wal-Mart host towns, but their sales also largely stabilized during the same 15-year period. The study will be published in a future issue of Economic Development Quarterly.

Innovation In The Health Care Sector Marches Forward

All eyes are on the Supreme Court as the nation awaits its decision about ObamaCare, but progress in the health sector nonetheless marches on. These changes in the real world of health care are driven not by Washington’s laws, rules, and endless regulations, but by companies, large and small, that are developing new ways to improve health care. Here are examples of some of their real-world solutions: Walmart is making a major investment in its new “Healthy Food Initiative” to help families stressed for time and money to eat better, more nutritious meals. Joe Quinn, senior director of issue management and strategic outreach for Walmart, described the company’s new five-year program to make it easier to live healthy by making more nutritious food more accessible and affordable.

Read more at Forbes

Helping Women Achieve a Common Dream

Walmart’s Global Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiative is working to create opportunity and empower women and girls in markets around the world. By investing in training, sourcing products from women, and increasing the gender diversity of our partners, we are supporting women (and mothers!) who are lifting themselves up and laying the groundwork for a stronger tomorrow.

Read more at the Huffington Post

Walmart Raises Funds for WVU Children’s Hospital

On May 1, Walmart stores and distribution centers and Sam’s Clubs across the state and region kicked off their 2012 fundraising campaign for WVU Children’s Hospital and Children’s Miracle Network. “Last year, this campaign raised more than $538,000, which is money we use to provide high quality care to every patient who walks through our doors,” Cheryl Jones, R.N., director of WVU Children’s Hospital, said in a news release. “We are so grateful to continue this partnership and look forward to extending it long into the future.”

Read more at the State Journal