This post may contain affiliate links, and I will be compensated (at no extra cost to you) when you make a purchase by clicking on my links.
Last week, my daughter and I had the opportunity to participate in a mobile packing event for Feed My Starving Children. It proved to be a terrific experience in support of a wonderful cause.
I want to share our experience with you because I believe this would be an excellent volunteer project for a group of employees and/or volunteers from a nursing home or other healthcare community. There’s also the possibility that some of your residents could participate; I’ll talk about that a bit later.
What is Feed My Starving Children?
FMSC is a nonprofit Christian organization that provides nutritious meals to starving people in nearly 70 countries around the world. While they do have permanent meal-packing sites in a few cities, volunteers pack most of the meals at mobile events around the United States.
On average, each volunteer packs 216 meals—enough to feed a starving person for 7 months. Last year, FMSC volunteers produced over 333 million meals!
FMSC has received a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator for the past 13 years. That’s the highest rating they grant a charity.
How serious is hunger in our world?
According to UNICEF, at least 6200 children in our world die every day from hunger-related causes. Sadly, hunger exists in the United States, too. However, meals packed by FMSC go to areas of the world that experience the most extreme poverty.
What’s it like to volunteer at a meal-packing event?
We registered online in advance, either as individuals or in groups. At our event, lots of small groups took part—as evidenced by their matching T-shirts.
In our city, the event lasted for 3 days, divided up into 2-hour shifts. Most people signed up for one shift, while others worked multiple shifts.
The event began with two short videos that described the work of FMSC, followed by a description of what we would be doing. It impressed me how well-organized the event was, especially considering the large number of people involved. There were around 800 volunteers in our time slot alone.
Everyone had to wear a hairnet and remove all jewelry, as well as clean their hands with special towelettes before beginning the packing process. Those directly involved with the food ingredients also had to wear plastic gloves.
There were 13 volunteers at each of a myriad of long tables covering the floor of a hockey arena. Assignments included measuring and dumping one of four ingredients into a funnel, holding bags underneath the funnels, weighing each bag, vacuum sealing the bags, and packing the completed bags of meals into boxes. An additional volunteer team kept the tables constantly stocked with ingredients.
The four ingredients we packed into the bags included a powdered vitamin supplement, dehydrated vegetables, soy, and rice. Some sites use dehydrated potatoes instead of rice.
Lively background music kept up the momentum, and the atmosphere was energetic and upbeat. The leaders also encouraged us by creating challenges between the groups and announcing how many bags we had packed.
Can our residents participate?
If you have a group of residents who would like to volunteer, the assignments are easy. In fact, the minimum age to volunteer is 5 (accompanied by an adult).
That being said, the event moves along at a quick pace. Obviously, the goal is to pack as many bags as possible in the 2 hours.
For people who would have difficulty standing in one place for almost 2 hours, they provide an optional assignment where volunteers can sit down. This group places labels on the meal bags.
If you have any questions about resident participation, there’s a contact person listed on the online registration form. They’ll be happy to help.
Would we pack meals again?
Absolutely! My daughter and I left the event with a better understanding of the problem of world hunger. It’s so easy to become desensitized when we can’t see the problem directly.
We also feel enormously blessed to live in this place and time. It’s humbling to think that we have access to such a variety of delicious and nutritious food pretty much any time we wish.
Most of all, it’s motivating to know that we can make such a significant impact on the lives of other people in just two hours of our time. Sometimes it’s easy to think that we can’t do enough as individuals to make a difference in our world. But by working together we can!
Have you ever participated in a Feed My Hungry Children meal packing event? I would love to have you share your experience in the comment section.
Leave a Reply