The Mad River Valley Rotary hosted a super-fun, meal- packaging event on Saturday, May 20th at 10:00 AM in the Harwood Union Middle and High School cafeteria. We recruited 70 community volunteers who assembled 14,000 (!) nutritious, rice-based meals that will be sent to school programs and orphanages in the developing world. We’ll be organizing the event with help from the Waterbury Rotary Club, the Harwood Interact Club, and Rise Against Hunger, a nonprofit growing a global movement to end hunger by empowering communities, nourishing lives and responding to emergencies.
Food insecurity has been one of our club’s primary areas of focus this year both in the Valley and beyond. Global hunger is a pressing problem, one that is expected to be especially severe this year due to the disruption of agricultural production in Ukraine, a major supplier of corn, wheat, sunflower oil and other food commodities. Besides helping hungry people eat, meals delivered to schools provide strong incentives for families to send their children to school, where the meal there may be their only meal. Encouraging school attendance helps lift the literacy rate, a key requirement for breaking the cycle of poverty.