[Anchor]

The 2nd Hometown Love Donation Awards ceremony, co-hosted by SBS and the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, will be held the day after tomorrow (the 4th), which is Hometown Love Day. The ceremony will honor meritorious individuals and outstanding local governments that have contributed to vitalizing the hometown love donation system.

Reporter Song In-ho has the details.

[Reporter]

This is an agricultural and livestock product processing plant in Anseong, Gyeonggi Province.

It processes offal from locally raised Korean beef to make ready-to-eat foods such as gomtang (beef bone soup) and gukbap (rice with soup). Thanks to their convenience, they are popular among general consumers as well as being return gifts for the hometown love donation system.

[Bang Sook-young / Gosam Agricultural Cooperative Anseong Machum Food Center: People show a lot of interest in the taste, and those who have tried it repurchase it, making it a product with high satisfaction. We produce products using Hanwoo and agricultural materials directly grown and raised in this region.]

Anseong City's hometown love donation fundraising amount last year reached 2.79 billion won, the highest among local governments in Gyeonggi Province.

The development of return gifts utilizing local agricultural and specialty products and designated donation projects, such as the "Mt. Halla climbing project for people with developmental disabilities," successfully garnered sympathy from donors.

Yeongju City in North Gyeongsang Province, a depopulation-hit area, used about 300 million won in hometown love donations to purchase new medical equipment, such as neonatal hearing screening devices, reviving an obstetrics and gynecology department facing the brink of closure.

[Cho Jae-sik / General Manager, Yeongju Christian Hospital: There is a lot of essential medical equipment in the obstetrics and gynecology department. We replaced all of it with new equipment. Although the number of deliveries and newborns is small, we need to protect the health of those mothers and babies.]

As the hometown love donation system—introduced to prevent regional extinction and promote balanced regional development—marks its fourth year this year, the 2nd Hometown Love Donation Awards ceremony will be held the day after tomorrow to select and honor local governments that have achieved remarkable results in operating the system.

In this ceremony co-hosted by SBS and the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, 51 regional and local governments nationwide applied, and a total of 15 local governments will be awarded through rigorous public performance evaluations and on-site inspections.

Among them, local governments winning the grand prize, gold prize, silver prize, and bronze prize will be granted special local allocation taxes from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety.

[Cho Kyung-hee / Chairperson of the 2nd Hometown Love Donation Awards Judging Committee: Overall, I thought that many local governments prepared much more compared to last year. The return gifts are also great, and I think they are operating their projects in a much more systematic manner.]

The ceremony, which will be held on the 4th at SBS Prism Tower in Sangam-dong, Seoul, to mark Hometown Love Day, will be broadcast live starting at 10 a.m. on the SBS YouTube channel.

(Camera: Lim Dong-guk | VJ: Kim Hyung-jin | Video Editing: Nam Il)