Week 19 - Feed My Starving Children and Lakeview Pantry

This week we went back to Feed My Starving Children, although to a new location for us, and to our old standby, the Lakeview Pantry.  Both were great experiences, and we enjoyed both very much.

On Tueday, we drove to Schaumburg to work with Feed My Starving Children.  You may remember this organization from Week 3.  The Schaumburg location was new for us, and while it is a smaller location, with facilities that are slightly less comprehensive than the one in Aurora, we like it much better because it takes much less time to get there, especially in the evening rush.  You may recall that the goal of this organization is to bring food to the most hungry people in the world, the ones who are starving.  To that end, they have only one product they make, pack and ship.  It is a special formulation of chicken protein, dried vegetables, soy powder and rice.  When mixed with water and cooked, it makes a nutritious mush that is easy to digest and delivers all of the nutrients and calories that a child needs to survive.  As an organization, they are pretty solid.  93% of all donations go directly to providing food, with other 7% used for management and fund raising.  In 2011, they shipped 133 million meals to hungry children all over the world.   When you consider that all of the food is packed by volunteers (565,000 in 2011) and all of the food is paid for by donors, you can see that this group does a great job from beginning to end.  They also have a 99.98% success rate of their food getting to its intended recipients.  Bad weather, political strife and bad luck account for the small amount of food that does not get to the people who need it.  The organization regards this number as miraculous, and attributes their success to the fact that the donors pray over every lot of food after it has been packaged.

This time around, Jen and I volunteered to work as warehouse crew again.  Since most people come with larger groups and since the packing process requires about 4 people minimum, we tend to just take the jobs we can do without having to sneak into another group.  That said, we decided that next time, we are packing food, not warehousing.  The warehouse crew has three jobs - make boxes, keep the rice and soy boxes full at the packing tables, and pack up the full boxes and put them on a pallet.  We got to work with a nice young man named Paul who perhaps 10 or 12 years old.  He was a really nice kid and a very hard worker.  He and Jen managed the soy and rice supplies, while I picked up boxes for most of the night.  There were a bunch of boxes already made up, so we did not have to do too much of that.   The rest of the group we were working with was made up of families from church groups, except for one little clutch of high school girls that worked a table by themselves.  Because there were a lot of kids, there was a lot of energy in the room, and they packed like mad.  It was all I could do to keep up with them as they filled up the boxes.  Each box weighs about 35 pounds, so I got winded pretty quickly hauling them across the room, weighing them, taping them up and putting them on a pallet.  I calculated that in just over an hour, I moved a little over a thousand pounds about 30'.  It was fun, and a good workout, and I was spent at the end.

At the end of the evening, the staff shares some stories about FSMC and their work, makes a pitch for monetary support and show the crew how they did.  They put it on a white board that looks like this:

  We were working with a pretty small group, about 38 people.  The goal for every session is to pack one box of food for each worker present, so we did pretty well.  This food was destined to be part of a much larger shipment to Nicaragua where it is desperately needed.  Not bad for less than two hours work...

I also took a picture of the packing floor:

In the foreground, you can see the trays of materials, a funnel on a stand, a scale, and an odd looking machine on the left.  This is a heat sealer which grabs the top of the bags and seals them closed.  The bags are then placed on the table next to the sealer.  They collect them there until 36 of them are ready (enough to fill a box) and then they go into the box.  The boxes are picked up and brought to another scale to verify that the correct number of bags are in the box, then sealed and stacked on a pallet.  Each station uses five people and there are two stations per box.  This location has twelve stations to create six boxes at a time.  When they are going full force, they can pack around 75 boxes per hour.

The other stop we made this week was to work with our friends at the Lakeview Pantry.  The big news there this week was a new freezer door to replace the old one, which did not seal properly and leaked water all over the floor.  Carrie was very happy about it.  I was also encouraged to hear that the Pantry continues to add to the things it does besides give out food.  They have been doing food tasting parties that include recipes as well as supplies.  They have a book club and movie nights.  It is great to see these initiatives taking off and experiencing some success.  On the food distribution front, it was a quiet night with a small crowd.  That means we get to be a little more generous, accommodate the more choosy patrons, and chat a little more with the patrons, so it was a great night.


If you would like to find out more about Feed My Starving Children, go to:

Feed My Starving Children

If you would like to learn more about the Lakeview Pantry, go to:

Lakeview Pantry