Several thousand Iowans will be helping to feed needy children and families within the state — and in locations around the world — during a five-day event starting this morning.
Chuck Current, executive director at Meals from the Heartland, says it’s the non-profit’s 19th annual Hunger Fight.
“We will welcome about 3,800 volunteers into our campus here in West Des Moines,” Current says, “and we are going to pack between 1,750,000 meals and 2-million meals.”
The large-scale community event involves a great deal of planning and logistics to coordinate nearly four-thousand volunteers and many tons of supplies.
“We’ve got a couple staff members that have gone out and recruited volunteers from churches and businesses,” Current says. “There are schools that are going to be here and we couldn’t do it without the hundreds of support volunteers who are usually our packmasters and they’re people with experience that come in and help us accomplish all this during these next couple days.”
Current says the one-and-three-quarter million meals that will be packaged through Saturday will provide food for more than 67-hundred children for an entire year.
“The meal that we’ll be packing is called our Hearty Pack. It’s a rice and soy meal. That meal is distributed here in Iowa, but mostly overseas,” Current says. “To give you an idea, we’ll have the opportunity to pack and share about 23.5 million meals this year, and two-and-a-half-million of those actually stay in Iowa.”
Each volunteer at the event will typically work a shift of about two hours, and they’ll be trained when they arrive.
“Then they’re assigned to a table. There are eight to ten people per table and they package the meals, put all the ingredients in, seal the bags, put them in a box. A box will contain 27 eight-serving bags, so there’s 216 servings in a box,” Current says, “and it’s placed on a pallet and then they are good to go.”
More volunteers are welcome. They can sign up at MealsfromtheHeartland.org.
