Patch Editors Bag Meals at Feed My Starving Children

We at Patch are routinely grateful for the support our communities show us, so we make a point of taking a few days each year to volunteer with local charitable organizations as part of our Give 5 program. 

On Tuesday afternoon, six other west-Chicago suburban Patch editors and I visited the Aurora branch of Feed My Starving Children, a charity that fights malnutrition my shipping meal formulas called MannaPacks to places worldwide where kids and families battle hunger and nutritional deficiency on a daily basis.

Volunteers at FMSC are invited to pack the food parcels, which each contain six meals (six cups of food,) with rice, soy, dried vegetables and a vitamin blend. The highly efficient assembly-line process means that a team of five can fill a bag in about 15 seconds. 

While Joe O’Donnell, Charlie Menchacha and Collin Czarnecki worked the warehouse, Karen Chadra, Mary Lopez, Amanda Luevano and I teamed up with a middle-school student from Burr Ridge to fill bags. It was loads of fun, and we got a great feeling from seeing the life-saving food pile up in our boxes.

Along with the other groups there—64 people in total—our shift at Feed My Starving Children packed 65 boxes of food, 36 MannaPacks to a box, which translates to 14,040 meals to feed 39 children for a year. Donors pay it forward, by providing funds, which pay for the meals.

Find out more about Feed My Starving Children here.