20-year-old Sylacauga woman crowned Miss Hoover 2020

A 20-year-old Sylacauga woman won the Miss Hoover 2020 competition among 11 candidates at the Hoover Library Theatre.

Caitlyn McTier, a senior at the University of Alabama, was crowned the winner by Miss Alabama 2019 Tiara Pennington on Nov. 17.

McTier will represent the city of Hoover for a year and compete in the Miss Alabama 2020 competition, typically held the first week in June.

She is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in mass media and hopes to later obtain a master’s degree in mass communication and become the director of communications for a nonprofit organization.

McTier for 11 years has been involved in battling food insecurity. She got interested in the problem when she was 9 years old and noticed that a fellow classmate seldom had a snack at school. She learned her classmate’s family was living in poverty and unable to provide enough food, and that motivated her to do something about it.

Since then, she has packed hundreds of food bins for families and more than 2,500 bags of food for students across central Alabama, she said in an essay she wrote for the competition. She also has hosted fundraisers, food drives, service projects and benefit concerts.

She is a founding member of the Alabama College Food Security Coalition and a member of the Alabama Child Hunger Task Force. At the University of Alabama, she founded a student task force to battle food insecurity and serves on the university’s Faculty Food Insecurity Task Force.

McTier worked with Jonathan Chin at New York University to make the University of Alabama a launch school for the Share Meals app, which allows students to see where free meals are on campus.

She conducted a yearlong independent study about food insecurity at the university, collecting qualitative and quantitative data through partnerships with the College of Communications and Social Work, and she created a video series that shows three food-insecure college students documenting their stories of struggling with poverty.

McTier has traveled through Alabama’s Black Belt region, speaking to people about food insecurity in rural Alabama, and visited 22 universities across the state to talk about food insecurity pantry structures.

For the past two years, she served as the director of videography for a Beat Auburn Beat Hunger campaign, which raised more than 300,000 pounds of food for the West Alabama Food Bank. She also established the University of Alabama Food Insecurity Awareness Day, which raised more than $1,500 in monetary donations and 200 donated meal swipes valued at $2,000.

The goal is to eradicate childhood food deprivation, she said.

McTier has a 4.0 GPA at Alabama, is on the Presidential Dean’s List, and is a member of the Mortar Board Honorary, Blue Key Honor Society and Cardinal Key Honor Society, for which she is historian. She also is a member of the Student Ambassadors’ Capstone Men and Women, serves as chief advisor to the president of the Student Government Association and won the Black Faculty Association’s Academic Distinction Award.

At the Miss Hoover competition, McTier sang “The Impossible Dream.” Each candidate had a 10-minute private interview with the judges, answered a follow-up question on stage during the competition and, during the evening gown portion of the competition, gave a 10-second statement about their social impact initiatives, said Julie Bentley, the competition director.

As the winner, McTier won a $5,000 scholarship. The first alternate and talent award winner was Kate Webb, while the second alternate was Annie Ozment, third alternate was Jordan Carraway and fourth alternate was Briana Caudle. The prize for each accomplishment was $200.

Scholarship money was provided by Gene and Pam Smith, Signature Homes and Abbey Residential.

Bella’s Bridal and Formal will provide formalwear for McTier throughout the year and for the Miss Alabama competition, and the Jeremy Stephens Salon will provide hair care, Bentley said.

Other in-kind contributors for the competition included Hoover Florist, The UPS Store on Caldwell Mill Road, Newk’s, Mr. Burch Formalwear, the Hoover branch of Burn Boot Camp, Carnaggio Photography, makeup artist Melissa Bogardus, Swindle Photography and the city of Hoover.