March 19, 2024

Helping the hungry in the communities

TRURO — An empowering event occurred Wednesday, April 13, in the Interstate 35 High School gym in Truro.

About 300 volunteers gave of their time to participate in a meal packaging event organized by Outreach, Inc., which has offices in Des Moines and Union.

The event coordinator from Outreach was Leon Sporrer. With 10 work stations, each manned by 10 workers, the volunteers worked in three one-hour shifts, with some volunteers working more than one shift.

The volunteers were students and adults of all ages. All of the workers were capable and enthusiastic, knowing they were helping other people.

There were two types of meals packages — macaroni and cheese dinner and pasta with Italian tomato basil sauce dinner. Each meal packaged contained five to six servings.

The work stations at each table required the workers to add dry ingredients (pasta, protein/soy) and a flavoring or cheese sauce packet to a plastic bag. Then, the bag would be precisely weighed, sealed and labeled and put into a box, with 36-45 bags per box.

At the end of the day, the volunteers had filled 271 boxes and provided 60,203 meals for the hungry.

The Madison Warren Ecumenical Association (MWEA) first learned of Outreach in November 2015. With Pastor Nick Grove of St. Charles Parish spearheading the effort over several months, more than $16,000 was donated by individuals, businesses, area church congregations, groups such as the 4-H Clubs, Boy Scouts, American Legion, Lions Clubs, Masons, Jesus’ Right Hand Ministries and many others.

The money enabled MWEA to contract with Outreach to hold the meal packaging event. The meals will be distributed locally through the Interstate 35 and Martensdale-St. Mary’s schools’ backpack programs, Jesus’ Right Hand Ministries in New Virginia and Madison County Multipurpose Center in Winterset.

Outreach was founded in 2004 by Iowa natives Floyd Hammer and his wife Kathy Hamilton, who, after a trip to Tanzania, saw there was a need to provide safe water, food, medical care and education to children and those in need, not only in Africa, but also in the United States.

In 2014, Outreach launched the Hunger Free Iowa Initiative with the goal of involving communities in all 99 Iowa counties to develop an action plan toward fighting hunger in their counties.

Outreach reports 19.3 percent of Iowa’s children are food insecure. That is, they lack access, at all times, to enough food to maintain an active and healthy life.

Organizing a meal packaging event is one way that nutritious meals can be provided to food banks and pantries and then distributed to those in need.

The goal of the initiative is to make Iowa a hunger free state. The local event on April 13 was a big step toward this goal.

The event organizers would like to give a thank you to all the donors who made the meal packaging possible.