The owners of Marination, who won the bid to move into the building at Seacrest on Harbor Avenue but then ran into numerous permitting issues, delaying their move until late summer at best are seeking the public's help to win a grant. They posted on their Facebook page a request for fans, friends and anyone else to vote for them in a grant program offered by LivingSocial and Chase bank. The effort by the two companies is to award "up to 12 individual grants of $250,000 to 12 small businesses."

Here's the Marination post:

"Okay you guys. This is seriously the most important post we've ever written.

LivingSocial and Chase have teamed up to grant $250k to 12 small businesses to help launch each small biz towards their biz dream. That's $250k PER biz -- granting out a total of $3 MILLION. Repeat it Austin Powers-style for full effect. Threeee MILLLLION dollars.

So, our dream has long been to achieve a meaningful depth of engagement, a depth of impact in our community, through Marination-based philanthropy. We dream of establishing a non-profit to do two things: Help kids (focus: obesity and education), and incubate/launch budding entrepreneurs (focus: retail food/street food). Our non-prof dream is a major core pillar that we put in our original biz plan for WHY we wanted to launch Big Blue in the first place.

Now, in our minds, and in the spreadsheets we're always tweaking, we would be much closer to our Golden Years, Golden Girls ifyouwill, before we'd be financially able to launch our biggest dream.
WELL! Not if we had $250k of seed money NOW!

We fit all of the requirements in very unique and strong ways. Roz has worked tirelessly burning the midnight oil to get our essays turned in.

And now, while you don't get to see our answers (it isn't set up like that), the final push for getting Chase and LivingSocial to officially consider us is to amass 250 votes.

250 measly votes. We've had tacos get four times that many votes in a week's time.

And that gives us hope, because we only have until June 30 to hit the magic number.

We can't link directly to us -- you have to search "marination mobile" for us to pop up. You can also search WA state and see which other small businesses you want to support. Your support isn't limited to just one. GO NW. ♥

PLEASE help us spread this message. It's the most important vote we've ever wanted. Do it for our KIDS, and for the creation of more local SMALL BIZ. And then help us name the Foundation! Aloha Foundation is already taken. Sigh.

LOVE YOU GUYS. XOXOXO."