Redeemer Lutheran packs over 1 million meals for starving children

By John McCallum

Current contributor

Redeemer Lutheran Church surpassed an important milestone on March 25 by preparing the 1 millionth package of food for distribution to starving children through an international relief organization.

The Spokane Valley church, located on Shafer Road off DishmanMica Road, has been helping feed children worldwide since 2015 through Feed My Starving Children (FMSC). With the except of the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, congregation members along with members of other Spokane-area churches and local businesses have raised money to purchase food stuffs and meet for a weekend in March to put that all together.

Founded in 1987 by late Minnesota businessman Richard Proudfit, FMSC has been providing “MannaPack” meals to children worldwide in over 70 countries — equating to about 3 billion meals so far, according to its website. The organization utilizes volunteers from around the U.S. to prepare the meals through “Mobile Pack” events, and in 2015 was looking for a location in the Spokane area large enough to accommodate a multi-day event. It was an opportunity Redeemer

Lutheran Associate Pastor Drew Bayless said the church “couldn’t pass up.”

“It really aligns with our core values of who we are,” Bayless said.

Charles Brondos, a member of Spokane’s Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church, agrees. Brondos first heard the FMSC story in 2008 while at — ironically — a place called Starving Rock State Park in Illinois. He remembered that story seven years later upon hearing that the organization was looking at Redeemer Lutheran as a Mobile Pack location.

“I looked at the video (on its website) and thought, ‘This is something we should do in Spokane,’” Brondos added.

Redeemer Lutheran Director of Operations and Communications Susan Baldwin said over 500 people volunteered to fill five shifts March 24 – 25: two on Friday and three on Saturday. The events are managed by fulltime staff from FMSC that travel throughout the U.S.

At the beginning of the noon –3 p.m. shift Saturday, the 100-plus local volunteers received orientation about FMSC along with instructions for preparing the meal packs. As part of the former, FMSC staff member Brad Olson told them that 1 in 9 children throughout the world goes hungry each day — and not just by missing a meal here and there.

“It’s that they missed several days,” Olson said. “They don’t know when the next meal will be.”

FMSC meal packing events are regulated by the federal Food and Drug Administration, and as such the volunteers were given instructions on what to wear and not to wear, handwashing and how to prepare the packs to maintain sanitary conditions. They were also given instructions on preparing the packs themselves, from loading the contents to sealing them for shipment.

Each pack consists of four basic food stuffs: a coffee cup-sized scoop of rice and soy along with a ladling spoon portion of vegetables and vitamins. According to its website, the meals generally ship overseas and not to children in the U.S. because they are “designed for the severe undernutrition that is common in the developing world” with a “taste and texture” not well received in the U.S.

Each meal costs 29 cents, with churches like Redeemer Lutheran using fundraising to purchase the ingredients. For other donations to FMSC, 90% goes to feeding children, with less than 10% used for fundraising, administration and overhead combined.

Volunteers at Redeemer Lutheran were divided into different tasks: seven heading to a separate room to prepare packing labels and 15 of high school age and older as warehouse workers, sealing the boxes of packs — each containing 36 meals — and loading pallets along with keeping packing stations stocked with food stuffs.

The rest manned the dozen food packing stations, anywhere from 6 – 8 per station. With popular music blaring from a portable P.A., and interspersed with chants and coordinated shouts of encouragement, four volunteers scooped up spoons and cups of food stuffs, pouring the ingredients down a funnel that loaded a plastic food pack underneath. After each pack was loaded, other volunteers took the packs and sealed and put them into boxes.

Some of the volunteers came from churches other than Redeemer and Beautiful Savior Lutheran. Baldwin said there was a group from Slavic Baptist Church at Saturday’s noon shift, while Brondos added area churches such as Holy Cross, St. John’s and Opportunity Presbyterian have sent volunteers in the past as well.

Not all the volunteers were associated with churches, and many were taking part in the Mobile Pack event for the first time. One of those was Jocelyn Nostrant, a junior from Central Valley High School who heard about it through her participation in Honor Society.

Nostrant said she was volunteering for all five shifts, and was led to do so through hearing about the challenges children and families face on a daily basis worldwide from wars, political upheaval and natural disasters. Given the cost of the meals, and how many children they would feed, she said giving her time was the least she could do.

“That number blows me away,” Nostrant said. “Wow, two hours out of my day, and I helped feed 100 kids. It feels very rewarding, knowing how many families and kids we’re helping. Everybody should have an equal chance at survival.”

Those rewards were also what led Lauren Privett to FMSC. The Grand Canyon University graduate, based out of Dallas, Texas, said she grew up in a low-income community in the Los Angeles-area where her mother was always aware of the precariousness of the family’s financial situation.

A friend told her about FMSC, and after volunteering for an event, Privett knew the organization was where she was meant to be.

“I quit my daytime job, volunteered then worked parttime until I got a fulltime job (with FSMC),” she said, adding her youth experiences provided inspiration to work with the organization.

“It gave me enough of a connection where I knew this was special to me,” Privett said.

Overall, volunteers at the Mobile Pack event March 24–25 prepared 139,968 meals — a number including the 1 millionth meal prepared since 2015 — and loaded 648 boxes of food.

“This equates to feeding 383 children one meal a day for a year,” Baldwin wrote in an email.

Those pallets of boxes go to an FMSC distribution center in Mesa, Arizona where they will head to countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, Cambodia, the Philippines and in the Caribbean. There, some of the 200 organizations working with FMSC will distribute the food to children.

“There are partners there so it does not go through the governments,” Brondos said. “Ninety-nine percent of meals get to their intended destination.”

While the packaged food was the focus, local food insecurity needs did not go overlooked. Baldwin said over the two days, volunteers donated 1,331 pounds of food to Spokane Valley Partners — much of it a mixture of “high protein items” like tuna fish and peanut butter along with staples such as cereal and soup.

Baldwin said the church has partnered with Spokane Valley Partners for over 20 years. Started by 10 churches in 1951, the organization now includes a food bank, a clothing bank and a mobile food distribution network.

“Redeemer is passionate about living out our mission beyond the four walls of our Church,” Baldwin, said. “We are committed to building relationships in our community — loving neighbors as Jesus loves us.”