More than 1,600 people volunteered at Mountainbrook Church this weekend to pack food for Feed My Starving Children, an organization that provides food for children in impoverished countries around the world.
“Chicken, veggies, soy and rice” was the mantra of the day, as volunteers packaged hundreds of thousands of meals to be shipped worldwide.
Each bag’s primary ingredient was rice, which the organization uses as a base because it is not only easy to cook, but is also culturally universal. The organization uses the chopped and dried vegetables because they provide the meal’s bulk of vitamins, and the chicken flavoring and soy provide essential protein and nutrients.
Courtney Lezanic, one of the leaders of the weekend’s event, said she was happy with the turnout.
“I love it when this is a first-time event for some people,” Lezanic said. “The energy levels are so high.”
Lezanic lives in Minneapolis, home of the headquarters of Feed My Starving Children. She said she volunteered with the organization for several years before applying to work there full-time. Now, she goes across the country, helping set up mobile packing sites such as the one at Mountainbrook Church.
Once volunteers began arriving at the church, they filed into a side room to watch a video explaining the mission of Feed My Starving Children before moving into the main room to pack.
The volunteers, mostly consisting of students, worked like an assembly line, filling and passing bag after bag down the line.
After each hour-long shift, Lezanic read the total number of meals packed. That number often exceeded 25,000.
From the church, the meals are shipped to one of Feed My Starving Children’s permanent sites in Arizona, which operates year-round, before being distributed all over the world.
The organization doesn’t distribute the food itself. Instead, it gives it for free to other charity and outreach programs.
Kevin Ewing, the Mountainbrook Feed My Starving Children supervisor, said this method is more effective than if the organization distributed the food itself.
“We work with schools, hospitals and orphanages, just to name a few,” Ewing said. “It means that our partner programs don’t have to pay for food, so they have more money in their budget for other things, like agriculture, education and finance.”
Ewing is a former elementary school principal who often led student trips to a permanent site of Feed My Starving Children. He later left his career in education to work for the organization.
“I’m passionate about it because this is still about children,” Ewing said. “It’s still about education. The only difference is that the children are in greater need.”
Although Feed My Starving Children is a Christian organization, Ewing said it welcomes people from all faiths and backgrounds to help the cause.
Jess Lillibridge, a kinesiology sophomore at Cal Poly, came to volunteer even though she doesn’t attend church.
“What matters is that they’re helping people who need help,” Lillibridge said. “It wouldn’t matter if this whole operation was run by Satanists if they were fundamentally helping people.”
Feed My Starving Children assists nearly 70 countries, and the organization identified Haiti, Nicaragua, the Phillipines, Zimbabwe and Somalia as focuses.
Recently, the permanent packing sites in the U.S. were tasked with providing an extra 5 million meals for Somalia, Ewing said. The sites worked Sundays, the day they would normally have had off. When the dust had settled, Feed My Starving Children had 9 million extra meals.
“A lot of the children we’re feeding there are in the final stages of starvation,” Lezanic said. “They have no muscle, they can’t stand and they’re not communicating. We bring these kids back from the brink.”
Ewing returned two weeks ago from a trip to Nicaragua, where city bank workers helped pack the first meals for Feed My Starving Children outside of U.S. borders.
“It was amazing,” Ewing said. “We even used rice and soy grown in Nicaragua. We worked about a quarter-mile from the school who received the meals and on Saturday, the schoolchildren helped out. There’s no lunch program in Nicaragua. For most of those kids, it was the only nutritious meal they got all day.”
For an organization that functions almost entirely through donations and volunteer efforts, Ewing said the one-hour shift most people came to at Mountainbrook this weekend was incredibly important.
“I think what makes this such a powerful experience is that it’s hands-on,” Ewing said. “They may never see these kids, but they can actively do something to feed them anyway.”