On May 9, students, parents, siblings and faculty at Riverside-Brookfield High School packed 50,544 meals in a two-hour “Nurture & Nourish” event. Forest Park Middle School packed more than 35,000 meals on January 19 and will again next January. Each of those meals cost $.42 and contain 9 grams of protein. Meals are packed six servings per shelf-stable packet. For $21, 228, then, Students Feeding Students (OPRF’s SFS) could create a store of 8,242 packets to distribute through their much-needed food lockers. Over the course of the school year, then, OPRF High School’s SFS could distribute 234 six-serving packets per week.
If, as a community, we can recruit 100-120 volunteers and raise the needed $21,228, then Feed6.org can bring to OPRF, as we did for Riverside-Brookfield, a mobile, turnkey production system that has been used for 15 years to pack 9.5 million meals. OPRF has the necessary space in its gymnasium or cafeteria. Feed6.org has the production system. And I am sure that Oak Park and River Forest residents have the heart and can raise the necessary volunteers and money.
Anyone interested in seeing how we enable communities to care for their food-insecure neighbors, is welcome to attend packing events we have coming up on Oct. 24 and Nov. 1 at the Allstate Arena in Rosemont. I’ll be happy to talk with anyone about attending one of those events and, hopefully, work with OPRF’s SFS and Feed6.org to plan our own event in the near future.
On Oct. 24 at the Allstate Arena in Rosemont, an organization with which I volunteer (Feed6 in partnership with The Chicago Wolves) will be managing a meal-packing event called HungerHeroes! It will benefit food-insecure veterans in Northern Illinois. This event should be of interest to Oak Park and River Forest residents because the 100,000 meals we will pack get donated to the Greater Chicago Food Depository and then to organizations like our own Beyond Hunger. The meals we will pack provide 9 grams of protein and are shelf-stable which is why Beyond Hunger can keep a supply on hand.
To learn more about Feed6, go to https://www.feed6.org. You can donate through that webpage. Please annotate your donation with “HungerHeroes!” and the name of your village. And if you want to be part of a team, please email relling@feed6.org. When you do, please specify whether you prefer the 9 a.m. shift or the 2 p.m. shift and let me know if you made a donation.