The food they send is basically a very nutritious mush made from chicken flavoring, dried vegetables, soy protein and rice. It is formulated to be as highly nutritious as possible for the lowest cost, and also to be able to be digested by people who are starving to death. The food is packaged into bags, each of which makes 6 meals. The bags are then placed into boxes, 36 bags per box, so that each box makes 216 meals at a cost to the organization of 24 cents per meal. All of the food is packed by volunteers, and paid for by donations. 93% of donations to FMSC go directly into purchasing the raw materials for the food bags. When you go to volunteer, they ask you to consider paying for the food you are packing, a suggested $52 donation.
We could only get into an evening session on a week night, so we had to try to get from Navy Pier at 5pm to Aurora at 6:30pm. It was a close thing, but we just made it in time to hear the entire introduction, an overview of what they do and why. We were part of a full group, which for this facility is 60 people. There was a wide range of ages, but the group was overwhelmingly made up of young people, high school and middle school students with their parents. We signed up as individuals, but it s clear that most people come to this work as part of a church or school group. The way the packing works, there are U-shaped stations around the work room. Each U has two stations for loading bags and sealing them, with a box packing station in the middle. Everyone gets around a table and gets a job - holding the bags on the funnel, scoping ingredients, weighing the bags, sealing the bags, or packing the bags in a box. As with the Greater Chicago Food Depository, everything was clearly thought out and had a good process to get a good result. Jen and I did not do any of this part though. We volunteered for the smaller crew, the warehouse crew. These people move raw materials from the warehouse to the stations and move the boxes from the stations to the warehouse. The last part of the job is what Jen and I did - we filled trays with rice and soy nuggets all night long. The rice comes in huge tyvek bags weighing about 2000# each and the soy comes in big pallet-sized boxes weighing about 800# each. Our job was to use big, gallon-sized scoops to fill the trays that went out to the packing stations. In the one hour of actual packing, I loaded almost all of one bag of rice, and Jen loaded almost all of a box of soy. What that actually means in volume of cooked rice is staggering!
The night went by quickly. The packing room is full of noise and high spirits because they make the tables shout a silly chant or something when they finish a box. The warehouse was a little quieter, which was more our speed anyway. We had a very nice time and worked with some great FMSC staff people. We loaded about 90 boxes, totaling a little over 19,000 meals, all of which were headed to Haiti as part of a large shipment of more than 200,000 meals. The only down side is they made us wear hair nets, so we looked like this:
If you want to help out loading food bags or donate some money for the cause, you can find their very good website here:
Feed My Starving Children
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