Kids Against Hunger is a 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to end starvation in the world. It was started in March 1999 by Richard Proudfit, a Minnesota businessman, under the name Feeding Children International. He eventually set up a program under this organization called “Kids Against Hunger”. This name is now used to identify the company. Kids Against Hunger packages and ships highly nutritious, life-saving meals to starving and malnourished children in developing countries and the United States. The aim of the corporation is for its meals to provide a stable nutritional base from which the recipient peoples can move their families from starvation to self-sufficiency. It accomplishes this by mobilizing the energy and caring of American children, teens, and adults on behalf of hungry children around the world. Kids Against Hunger seeks to end the literal hunger of poor children receiving the meals, but also satisfies a hunger among prosperous Americans, as well – a hunger for meaning and contribution.

There are several steps involved with holding your event. Leadership and volunteers need to be recruited and funds need to be raised. There should be one person in charge of the overall event and several other leaders in charge of various aspects of the event (i.e. volunteers, promotion and fundraising, logistics, and packaging). After talking with Youth Encounter and setting a date you should begin to promote the event and start fundraising.

Each packaging line takes about 270 square feet of space which includes some ingredient staging area as well as space for stacking finished boxes of food. Your space requirements will vary depending on the size of your event. The Youth Encounter team will come with the capability of doing an event with two to four packaging lines. Each line will be from 16 to 18 feet long depending on the tables used. A room that is at least 30 feet long and 18 feet wide would accommodate two packaging lines. Larger events would need more space.

It takes about 11 volunteers to staff a packaging station (a packaging station is the assembly line that produces the bags of food and packs them into cartons for shipping), with an additional 2-3 volunteers needed as runners to coordinate boxes, food, etc. A packaging station with 11 people packaging (plus 2 or 3 runners) working a one hour shift should be able to package between 1,500 to 2,000 meals (depending on the experience and ages of the volunteers).

The cost to package food is $0.25 per meal. This covers the cost of ingredients, the supplies needed to package food, the cost of shipping the ingredients to your packaging site as well as getting the packaged food picked up and shipped, as well as logistical and administrative costs.

Each Kids Against Hunger meal consists of rice, soy, mixed vegetables, and a vitamin and mineral mixture. Rice is used because it is one of the most highly recognized food staples in the world. Soy is rich in protein. It contains 52% protein, three times the protein of the same weight of red meat. Protein is need for growth and repair of the body and helps transport nutrients through the body, which helps fight infection. The lack of protein can cause severe growth retardation, loss of hair color, wounds that do not heal, anemia, weakness, and increased risk of infection. Vegetable mixture is added containing carrot, onion, tomato, celery, cabbage, and bell pepper for color and flavor. The final ingredient is the vitamin and mineral powder which has an artificial chicken flavor and contains 21 essential vitamins and minerals that the body needs for proper growth and development.

Kids Against Hunger will make arrangements to have the ingredients and packaging supplies sent to your facility a day or two before your event. You will need to have people on hand to help unload the material.

Kids Against Hunger will make arrangements to have the packaged food picked up by a freight company the first or second business day after your event. Volunteers will need to be on hand to help facilitate this pick-up.

Kids Against Hunger does not do any in-country food distribution ourselves. Our role is to produce the food and ship it as far as a port of entry, and from there we rely on trusted feeding partners in recipient countries to receive and distribute the food. Some satellites are affiliated with a missionary, clinic, school, orphanage, or development agency in a developing country to which they send their food. If the satellite doesn’t have any connections in countries needing food, the national organization will assist it to find reliable Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to work with as recipients of their food. In other cases, the national Kids Against Hunger organization will coordinate several satellites shipping food to an area suffering from famine.

Kids Against Hunger will attempt to send only what you will need for your particular packaging event, minimizing the amount of leftovers. However, it is very difficult to be exact on all four ingredients, so you will likely have some leftover food. The Youth Encounter team does not have the space to take these leftovers with them, and the packaged food may be shipped elsewhere than returning to the Kids Against Hunger warehouse. If you have complete bags or boxes of ingredients, Kids Against Hunger will likely have it picked up and returned to the warehouse, but this should be pretty rare. Loose ingredients can be kept and cooked, donated to a local feeding program, or thrown away (at your discretion). To learn more please contact: Kids Against Hunger International Headquarters; 5401 Boone Ave. South New Hope, MN 55428; 763-257-0202; www.kidsdagainsthunger.org.

A list of countries is available on the Kids Against Hunger website.