World Hunger

How Can One Person Feed a Million Starving Children?

Volunteering with Feed My Starving Children

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“As a Christian nonprofit organization, Feed My Starving Children is called to feed God’s starving children hungry in body and spirit.” — from the FMSC mission statement

On Tuesday this week, my wife and I volunteered at a local church for their annual MobilePack challenge. Lasting four days, the goal of the Live Oaks Community Church event was to pack 404,352 meals by organizing teams of volunteers to work together.

Feed My Starving Children (FMSC) is a non-profit Christian organization that works to help fulfill the U.N. Zero Hunger goal to create a world free of hunger by 2030. According to FMSC’s 2022/23 impact report, in the past year, they provided over 400 million meals and fed 1.2 million children for the year. Their goal for the coming year is to surpass their four billionth meal delivered.

More than 120 volunteers turned out on Tuesday to help (and the church has nine more such sessions planned this week, so the total number of volunteers mobilized locally may be close to ten times that number). Mary Ellen and I were part of Team 14, an eight-member group of volunteers forming two assembly lines to pack meals into plastic bags called “MannaPacks”. After a brief orientation, we hit the ground running.

One person on our team put empty plastic food bags under a funnel-like stand, then two used measuring spoons to add vitamins and vegetables, and two more scooped soybeans and rice. Two others weighed and adjusted the bags, then one sealed the bags using a “seal-a-meal” style impulse heat sealer. Finally, the bags were packed into boxes of 36.

Other volunteers were “floaters,” with some replenishing our team’s stocks, others carting away our filled boxes, and still more helping out the team when one station fell behind.

We started out slow, being new to our jobs, but gradually found ways to work better as a team and increase our pace over the span of our two-hour shift. I assisted Mary Ellen in the “sealing” operation and packed the boxes. Last year, when I volunteered at the same event, my job was to measure a spoonful of vegetables into each MannaPack.

MannaPacks are not quite “ready to eat.” After shipping to worldwide destinations, the packaged ingredients are cooked in boiling water by local residents and seasoned to taste.

We were given cooked (unseasoned) samples to try, and I found it bland but palatable, with a chewy texture something like wheat germ.

Where does the food go?

Feed My Starving Children distributes food all over the world, regardless of religious or ethnic background. Since 2009, they have sent food to 112 different countries. See this page describing regions they serve, with a world map.

Why use people to create MannaPacks? Couldn’t machines do it more efficiently?

I had time to think about this while I was shoveling bags filled with rice and soybeans. There’s something about the repetition of manual labor that leads to contemplation.

I thought about Jesus washing feet and something he said that is more associated with the Sermon on the Mount but is probably applicable here, too:

“Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40).

And I thought about another great leader from a different time.

Gandhi saw his countrymen remaining hungry even after hard labor. He preached that each of us should spin yarn for half an hour every day so as to feel one with the hungry.

My experience was uplifting. According to Jim Erb, Live Oaks Community Church Mobilization Pastor:

“We’ve just found that people love serving as it benefits the larger community and the world.”

Question: How can one person feed a million starving children?

Answer: One spoonful at a time.

Thank you for reading. To learn more about FMSC, please visit their website here. If you’re interested in volunteering for FMSC, visit their website here.

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