Irish Youths Aid Anti-Hunger Drive

Ten Irish teens will help members of a local charity collect food for the needy at a Woodland Hills supermarket today.

Members of Fermanagh Youth Together, a volunteer organization based in Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, are visiting the West Valley for three weeks, two of which will be spent doing charity work.

Fermanagh Youth Together was established in 1975 to bring young Catholics and Protestants together to serve and lift the morale of their war-torn communities. Their motto is: “Opinions differ, but don’t divide.”

The youths, ages 15 to 18, will be outside the Ralphs supermarket at 21909 Ventura Blvd. between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., asking shoppers to purchase a few nonperishable items to donate to Love Is Feeding Everyone, said Sandy Mullins, a spokeswoman for the organization.

“We jumped at the chance to have them help us,” she said. “The notion of having a Protestant and Catholic side by side in America gathering food for our hungry is quite remarkable.”

LIFE is a community based food distribution program that serves more than 176,000 people weekly in Los Angeles. Mullins said today’s collection will be the beginning of a resurgence of the charity’s supermarket food drive, which was last conducted in 1993.

The food collection effort is a way for the group to give back to their benefactors in Los Angeles.

“There is so much tension in Northern Ireland,” said Tarzana resident Kate Flannery, who helped bring the teens to California. “But there is so much promise, too.”