Big Lots Donates $100K to Special Needs Program

Columbus, Ohio, Fortune 500 retailer Big Lots announced that it will donate $100,000 to a local Chabad-Lubavitch project that helps children with special needs acquire life and job skills through a mock town square.

The donation to the Chabad House Life Town – a simulated city currently spread throughout the former Kent Elementary school building in the Ohio capital – will help support programs at the project’s permanent home when it moves in the fall to the soon-to-be-completed Lore Schottenstein Chabad House in nearby New Albany.

Modeled after the Life Town interactive indoor city operated by the Friendship Circle in suburban Detroit, the Ohio Life Town – run by the Columbus chapter of the Friendship Circle, an international network of programs that pair teenage volunteers with children with special needs – teaches children how to make appointments, present an insurance card at the doctor’s office, make deposits and withdrawals at a bank, and other everyday tasks.