Fashion Outlets of Niagara Falls beats goal for Community Missions food drive

With the winter months quickly approaching, the Fashion Outlets of Niagara Falls conducted a competition to stock the shelves at the Community Missions' food pantry. More than 3,000 pounds of food later, the drive has officially been declared a success.

"This has been a fun project for us," said Mary Whelan, general manager at the Fashion Outlets of Niagara Falls. "It has been fun to watch the stores get extremely competitive. It was also great to see businesses outside of our mall tenants also get involved, like Burger King, our security company and even the post office. It is especially rewarding to know that it is all for such a good cause."

The mall's management enlisted several team leaders to motivate sections of the shopping center to give. The stores bringing in the top three amounts of food items each received specific prizes, including catered meals and additional perks.

This food drive has been held in conjunction with the drive engineered by Gary Strenkoski as a part of the Niagara Electric Lights Parade, to be held Saturday.

Team leaders for the project included Jennifer Knibbs, manager at Gap; Rose Rivers, manager at Calvin Klein; Marylou Bilson, manager at Samsonite; Linda Promowicz, manager at Maidenform; Doreen Poole, manager at Izod; and Melissa Muoio, manager at Tommy Hilfiger.

In 2012, CMI provided more than 70,000 meals and 9,000 nights of care within its crisis services programs. Additional agency programs serve adults and youth with psychiatric disabilities, parolees, at-risk youth and other underserved populations in both residential and recovery-orientated settings. For more information on the services and programs provided by Community Missions, visit http://www.communitymissions.org or connect via Facebook or Twitter.