Today, about 100 students and volunteers at Mississippi State University will package over 10,000 meals to be shipped around the world.
That’s the goal anyway, according to Michelle Garraway, program coordinator at the Center for Advancement of Service-Learning Excellence (CASLE). CASLE is an organization on MSU’s campus which matches students and professors with organizations for projects so that students can get real-world experience pertaining to their studies.
For the second year in a row, CASLE has partnered with Stop Hunger Now, an international nonprofit which recruits volunteers from religious organizations, schools and universities, corporations and other organizations to package meals which are then shipped all over the world. This year CASLE and Stop Hunger Now will set up the meal-packaging event in the Bost Conference Center on MSU’s campus beginning at 1 p.m. today.
CASLE has recruited students from the True Maroon program, a program for freshmen to help them make the transition into college. Garraway estimates 80 students from the program will volunteer at the meal-packaging event on Friday, while another 20 students will arrive from other campus organizations.
It seems like a small number of volunteers to be able to package over 10,000 meals in a little over an hour, but Garraway says she was surprised how well it worked last year.
“The Stop Hunger Now team kind of has it down to a science,” Garraway said.
How it works
Volunteers package raw materials, including rice, soy, dehydrated vegetables, flavoring mixture and a mix of 23 vitamins and minerals. When representatives from Stop Hunger Now arrive in a truck, they unload the raw materials and packaging materials and set up different stations. Some of the volunteers assemble or package boxes. Others measure out the raw materials or pour them into the packages.
One package holds six meals, and one box holds six/36 packages. One of the Stop Hunger Now representatives has a gong that he or she rings every time 1,000 meals are packaged.
The atmosphere is celebratory and energized, said Pat Ware, program coordinator for Stop Hunger Now’s Jackson office. Music is playing and people are chatting as they work. College and high school students tend to be more energized than a lot of the volunteers Stop Hunger Now gets from corporations or churches, Ware said. While volunteers from companies often feel like they’re still at work, students are usually volunteers.
“The students last year told us over and over again that they really enjoyed the event because they didn’t feel like they were standing around and didn’t know what to do, nor were they standing idle and didn’t feel like they were being of any use,” Garraway said. “It’s a great event for them both to do something and also to see that it really is going somewhere, that they really are making an impact in some way.”
In fact, the students can learn where the food they packaged was sent because Stop Hunger Now dates all the boxes and keeps track of where they go. Last year MSU students packaged meals that went to El Salvador and Liberia.
Stop Hunger Now partners with other organizations to distribute the meals. Usually the organizations focus on education, Ware said.
The Jackson office does around 100 volunteer events a year, Ware said, sometimes driving as many as five hours to reach destinations as far from Jackson as Tuscaloosa and Memphis.
“We could (set up) a factory and package a million meals a day and ship them all over the world, but that’s not what we believe is going to end hunger,” Ware said. “What we believe is going to end hunger is the volunteers and the movement to end hunger. So that’s why we do the volunteer-based meal packaging program as opposed to, say, a factory based. Because we want to get these people involved. We want them to get on social media, we want them to share it with their friends and family so that it’s not just a factory in the middle of nowhere packaging meals. It’s people getting their hands on the meals that are going to be eventually eaten by somebody who they’re never going to meet.”
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