By Cassie Phillips

Several students, faculty, and staff volunteered February 24 to help feed children in poor countries.

During Brian McGee’s presidential inauguration week at Quincy University, each day had a different event or session that students, faculty, and staff could attend. The community service project was held on Monday.

This community service project’s main initiatives were to provide support locally and globally. The global initiative was to send bagged meals to kids in orphanages and places where disaster might strike, and food is limited.

QU hosted the program Feeding Children Worldwide.

Volunteer jobs included bagging rice, dried vegetables, protein, and chicken flavoring. Each bag will make around six servings of food. Volunteers packed up 30 boxes with 36 bags of food inside. In total, they packaged over 1,000 bags of food for those in need.

Ronald Heard is the president of Feeding Children Worldwide, Illinois. He started the service project with an introduction and a short video that explained the importance of Feeding Children Worldwide. 

“We feed starving children that’s the bottom line; we have a product that contains rice, protein, chicken flavoring, and dried vegetables. They’re put together in plastic bags, and then we weigh the bags seal the bags and put them in a box. We ship them around the world and to local food pantries, makes a great rice soup,” Heard said.

Sara Philips, Experiential Learning Specialist, helped get volunteers for this event. With the help of all the students, faculty, and staff, the service day reached up to 79 volunteers.

“It’s really eye-opening to bag food for kids that might not know where their next meal will come from, I am so fortunate not to have to worry about not having food,” Phillips said. “I enjoyed watching the campus community come together to serve the people in need locally and globally.”

Becky Graff volunteered with the rest of the student financial service’s office. Her job was to weigh the amount of food in each bag. Each bag had to be a certain weight so that it could be sent to other countries.

“The concept of feeding the world I think is a major issue that is often overlooked, packaging food seems so simple yet so powerful,” Graff said.

“Well A) The fact that it seems so little in a package and how many they said they could feed with just that little bit of food and B) how they get this food into the different countries, where they have to smuggle it in, these parts are very interesting to me,” Graff said.

Volunteers also helped make hygiene kits for local facilities. Local agencies are in need of hygiene products that help members of the Quincy community.

“The campus also provided service locally, packaging shampoo, soaps, toothbrushes, and toothpaste, to give away locally,” Phillips said.

They packaged 80 hygiene kits. The kits will be sent to local facilities and will be given out to those whom need it.