This year’s local Rise Against Hunger event organizers are counting on packing 65,000 meals in about four hours on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, and they are hopeful that folks from across Vance and Granville counties will join in the effort.
“It’s about the community coming together” as much as preparing bags of a nutritious mixture that are sent to places across the globe to feed hungry people, said co-organizer Sue Nicholas.
The Rise Against Hunger pack-a-thon returns this year to the Vance-Granville Community College Civic Center.
As of Wednesday, about 75 people had signed up to take part in the Jan. 20 event, but Nicholas said they’ll need more like 300 to make sure they can achieve the 65,000 goal.
But the event isn’t just about packing food to send to other continents, she added. Non-perishable food items will be collected to be shared with ACTS in Henderson and ACIM in Oxford, local food banks that feed hungry people in the two counties.
The set-up for the day is pretty simple – individuals or groups can sign up for one of two shifts, the first is from 10 a.m. to 12 noon, and the second shift covers 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
During the two-hour shifts, teams will measure rice, soy, dehydrated vegetables and more to create nutritious and transportable bags, each of which will feed six people, Nicholas said.
She and co-organizer Sandra Wiggins have been working through details of the day for the past few months, and there’s a lot of excitement about bringing the community together to work for a common goal.
“It takes all of us to do this – working together is the most important thing,” Nicholas said. “As a community, you come together…for such a great cause – to fight hunger.”
And participants have fun as they get the work done, she added. “Before you know it, we’ve packaged 10,000, then 20,000,” and a gong sounds to celebrate each time 10,000 meals are completed.
“You have fun while doing good,” Nicholas said.
It was 2020 when the event was held at the farmers market, she recalled. “That was the first time (that) it was a big collaboration of folks,” Nicholas said. “There was lots of positive energy from it,” but the COVID-19 pandemic derailed plans for a couple of years. Fast-forward to last year’s event, held at the VGCC Civic Center, when teams packed 60,000 meals.
There’s a fundraising component to the pack-a-thon, too, Nicholas said, and there’s still a considerable amount to go – about $21,000. But Nicholas is confident that folks in the two counties will come together to reach that goal, too.
For those who may wonder just how that money will be spent, Nicholas said Rise Against Hunger has a four-star rating with a charity score of 90 percent, which means money goes to buy the food and then get it delivered.
The main office is located in Raleigh, she said. Rise Against Hunger was started in 1998 by Ray Buchanan, a former Marine and a retired Methodist minister. As a Marine, he saw parts of the world where people struggled to have enough to eat, so he started the organization to help feed hungry people around the world.
Nicholas said the meals that will be packed in Henderson are destined to wherever they are needed the most. A couple of months after the pack-a-thon, she expects to be notified where the pallets of boxed and bagged meals were sent.
“They can end up in any place across the world.”
There’s a QR code to scan to join the team, go to https://www.riseagainsthunger.org/register/?id=701Pj00000DGxfnIAD
or you can call Nicholas at 252.425.4505 and she can help get you registered.
Visit https://www.riseagainsthunger.org/ to learn more about the organization and its impact.
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