Public invited to help assemble food packages for starving children

Feed My Starving Children is a charity that works to feed starving children across the globe by funding initiatives that provide food to be grown and made into easily-assembled packages and shipped to areas of the world where food is scarce.

For two days next week, people in Jackson have the opportunity to be physically involved in that process.

“This is something we’ve been wanting to do here in Jackson and were scheduled to do three years ago before the pandemic shut it down,” said Eric Petty, minister at Skyline Church of Christ who’s helping coordinate the event. “Feed My Starving Children is the organization that Tacos For Life helps fund with their sales, so this is another great way to help them.”

The way the meal pack works is people can sign up for two-hour shifts.

“Each shift is teams of 10, so if a person can sign up and find nine friends or family members to work as a team, that would be awesome,” Petty said. “It’s a great way for a family to work together to do something with a global impact as a family.

“But if you sign up by yourself, you’ll be placed with a team. And you can also sign up and sign up for 10 people even if you don’t know who those other nine are when you sign up. Just be sure to bring them when it’s time for you to help.”

Petty said Feed My Starving Child has developed the ideal mixture of cost-effective ingredients to feed a child a meal for the vitamins and nutrients he or she needs for a meal.

Large quantities of the ingredients like rice and certain vegetables will be shipped to Jackson Christian’s next week for the meal packing.

Each team will take specific quantities all of the ingredients, pour them into the meal package through a funnel, box them put, load them onto a pallet and those pallets will be loaded onto a large truck to be taken to a distribution point.

“These meals are taken all over the world,” Petty said. “The main places they’ve been taken to in the last year or so is Ukraine for refugees and Turkey in the aftermath of the earthquake they had.”

Anyone who wants to sign up can do so at fmsc.org. Click on the “volunteer” button and look for the “mobile packing near me” button.

“Once they click on that and insert a zip code or the city of Jackson, we’ll come up because right now we’re the only mobile packing event in Tennessee this year,” Petty said. “You’ll also have to create an account with your name and e-mail address, but anyone who wants to can, so anyone can use that site to sign up and come on.

“This isn’t an event about one church or one school. This is a chance for the Jackson community to come together to do some work locally that will have an impact globally.”Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news