You Can Make a Positive Difference!

You can make a positive difference in this world!

Today I led another meal packaging event with church, volunteers from the community, and Rise Against Hunger! Together we packaged 20,000 meals!

I had a great team of people from the church who worked tirelessly to raise over $5800 to fund the meal packaging.



Someone asked how we raised the funds.  
We had two bake sales, a fundraising day with Panera, and a fundraising day with Fuddruckers. One of our team members sold over $20,000 of ShopRite cards over the past year. ShopRite gives 5% of the sale of those cards to us for the fundraiser ($1000 this year). A church group, Hillside3d, gave over $1100. We also had a tent at Suckasunny Day and collected funds from folks from town stopping by.

We had several businesses donate funds (and Flanders Bagels donated dozens of bagels for the event)!  We created a banner for our supporters (we used printastic to print it). We hung the banner at the event and took photos of everyone with it. The banner will be hung at the Rise Against Hunger warehouse in Kearney New Jersey where it will be seen by all of the groups who come there to package meals (I'll post a photo here later showing the banner in it's new home).

You can make a difference too!
  How?  You can contact Rise Against Hunger and they'll work with you. If you can raise enough for 10,000 meals, then you can package them at your location. If you don't have a location big enough (or if you can't raise enough for 10,000 meals), then you can pack meals at their local warehouse. There are dozens of warehouses across the country. Our local warehouse is in Kearney, New Jersey.

How I started
I started doing this in 2016 after I volunteered at a meal packing event that was sponsored by IBM and Arrow electronics at a conference in Las Vegas that I did a few presentations at. I was very interested because our church had done something very similar with GAIN USA a few years ago. I enjoyed working side-by-side with people so much at those events that I wanted to do it again. I stepped up to make it happen! You can too!

Here's what I've been able to lead:

• October 22, 2016 Hillside Church:  $3,633.12 = 12,528 meals packed by about 60 people (shipped to Uganda)
• Feb 25, 2017: IBM Club NJ at RAH Kearney Warehouse: $2,944 given by IBM Club NJ = 10,152 meals packed by about 50 people
• May 13, 2017: IBM Club NJ at RAH Kearney Warehouse: $2,000 IBM Grant = 6,696 meals packed by about 40 people (shopped to Haiti)
• October 28, 2017: Hillside Church: Raised $3,382.56= 11,664 meals plus 1,512 meals that Heinz donated to match the same amount we went over our 10,000 meal goal = 13,176 meals total packed by 80 people. (Shipped to Swaziland)
•  October 27, 2018: Hillside Church: Raised $5,888.16 = 20,304 meals packed by about 80 people. We will hear soon where these are shipped to. I'll post a comment here when they ship.

So, with the 46,008 meals packed at church and the 16,848 packed through the IBM Club NJ, we've packed 62,856 meals!

Do you want to lead an event like this?
If you are interested in leading an event like this, the folks at Rise Against Hunger would like to work with you. If you would like my input, I would be happy to help! Just contact me! It's loads of fun! You get to meet a lot of great people, connect a lot of people to others, give people a chance to help others, and help so many people to have the food that they need too!

How to Donate for the 2019 Event
If you want to donate to the 2019 event (or volunteer to help), you can donate online at this link:
http://events.stophungernow.org/HillsideLutheran102619

Or, you can mail a check to the church:
Hillside Church; 113 South Hillside Ave, Succasunna, NJ 07876 USA" and put "Rise Against Hunger Meail Packaging" in the note on the check.
Thank you!