Friendship Circle wins $100,000 in Chase Bank contest

A Chabad-initiated project won a $100,000 grant last week when it was named a runner up in “The Chase,” a highly publicized contest run on Facebook.

Friendship Circle, a Michigan-based project that helps families with children with special needs, finished fourth in the JP Morgan Chase Bank Community Giving Project contest, which offered $5 million in prizes to charities with budgets smaller than $10 million.

The Chabad project received 59,023 votes. The winner was Invisible Children, a San Diego–based project that helps child refugees of the civil war in Uganda.

The bank created a platform on which charities could create fan pages and ask for votes. The top 100 vote getters by Dec. 12 were named finalists and awarded $25,000 each. The top finalists competed in a second round of voting.

Founded in 1994 by Rabbi Levi and Bassie Shemtov in West Bloomfield, Mich., Friendship Circle now has 65 branches in the United States, Canada, Australia, France and China, comprising 4,000 beneficiaries and their families and more than 8,000 volunteers. — jta