BOARDMAN, Ohio (WKBN) — One local organization is looking to help fund its new facility after holding a purse raffle earlier today.

Animal Charity of Ohio held its first-ever Purses and Paws raffle event at its new location on Southern Boulevard in Boardman.

There were purse raffles for almost 30 designer bags, including Kate Spade, Michael Kors and Juicy Couture.

There were also chances to win basket raffles and Animal Charity merchandise you could buy.
Jane MacMurchy with Animal Charity of Ohio says the goal is to raise $1,000.

“We still have one million dollars worth of work left, but we’re hoping with every single event like this that we hold is going to continue to chip away at it,” Jane MacMurchy with the Animal Charity of Ohio said.

The grand opening for Animal Charity of Ohio’s new facility is scheduled for June 24.

BROOKINGS, S.D. (KELO) – A group of SDSU students are back from Kenya this week after competing for a Hult Prize — which is a global program challenging college students to solve the world’s most pressing issues.

Extraordinary things can happen inside a scientific lab. For example, a plastic film made out of soybean hulls and sustainable chemicals. The hope is that one day, it could create entire grocery bags.

“Our product, bAGgy, instead of going into landfill or ocean for 500 years in order to decompose, it takes 60 days for the plastic films to decompose,” Hunter Eide, an SDSU graduate who helped create Agri-Cycle Innovations, said.

It’s a business plan created by four students at SDSU, combined with the research of Dr. Srinivas Janaswamy and his graduate students.

“It’s going to function very similar to your regular plastic bag that for like the consumers at the end, the experience will be the same for them,” Kylie Rosenau, an SDSU student who helped create Agri-Cycle Innovations, said. “So really takes the burden of having to recycle or reuse off of them and puts it on like the manufacturers.”

They call it Agri-Cycle Innovations and it led this team to Kenya for the second round of an international contest. They were picked as one of 360 teams out of 10,000 around the world to advance for the Hult Prize.

“I always like believed in our team and what we put together, but it’s like when you know there’s that many people and so many incredible ideas coming into this, it’s not like we were over-confident by any means,” Rosenau said. “So, it was really just kind of confirmed that, yeah, we’ve put something great together.”

Unfortunately, the SDSU team did not win the one million dollar grand prize, but they are proud of what they created.

“Oftentimes, it seems like the world is in a lot of crisis, there’s a lot of bad things, but you know, what can we as young and the next generation do to help positively change,” Eide said. “And continue to do it in a way to generate business and the economy in order to go forward with that.”

The students say soybean hulls were picked because it’s the part of the soybean that isn’t used for food or animal feed. So, it can be used without farmers having to plant more crop in order to make the bags.

WISCONSIN — Hundreds of thousands of dollars are headed to Wisconsin to help curtail issues tied to elder abuse, as the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay works with the Wisconsin Department of Justice and other agencies to strengthen the Elder Justice Coalition in Wisconsin.

“[We’re] working to protect older adults from financial exploitation and from abuse and neglect,” said Laura Nolan, the executive manager for business and government outreach at UW-Green Bay. “There’s a variety of programs that we are utilizing our resources for to really help strengthen what we have here in Wisconsin, bringing together the people who care about helping older adults — law enforcement, banking entities, our state resources — and really trying to tackle a problem that has a huge impact on our older adults.”

According to UW-Green Bay, data from the U.S. Census Bureau revealed nearly 26% of Wisconsin’s population will be 60 and older by 2030, and scammers aim to pounce.

“The scammers are really good,” Nolan said. “We shouldn’t feel embarrassed if we fell for a scam. The most important thing to do is to actually get that help right away: Report it to the police, talk to your financial institution [and] the FBI has a hotline where you can report it and get extra help — so there are a lot of resources and help out there.

Watch the full interview above.