With 99 signups at South Minneapolis and 271 for the Bloomington Packathon since Wednesday, we thought the time was right to provide more opportunities for you to help Haiti. So we've decided to make a big push and try to pack 40,000 meals in a week! To do that we've opened four more sessions:
If any of these dates work for you, sign up and come!
I do need to mention that buying these extra meals has used up the money we currently have for purchasing ingredients and supplies. We currently have enough ingredients to get through mid-February, but anything after that will require additional funds. Our food costs 23 cents a meal, and your contributions go directly to running the satellite and supporting the KAH home office so that they can support us! Please consider supporting our efforts to help lift Haiti out of this crisis. Thank you very much!
Wow—at this point we have had 240 people sign up to pack food in the last two days! We are very grateful for everybody who is coming together to help the nation of Haiti during this crisis.
To provide additional opportunities to pack, we have expanded all of our packing sessions to 4 packing lines, so all of our sessions can take 40 people. This will nearly double the number of volunteers that we can take on. We have also purchased ingredients for an additional 41,000 meals for the South Minneapolis satellite so that we have enough supplies for the expanded sessions.
If all these sessions fill up (and they just might), we’ll be looking to open more sessions. However, we will also need additional donations to make that happen.
Leann Pye with Joy in Hope and Bob Davisson with Lifeline Haiti have both posted updates with the latest news from their orphanages and schools. So far the buildings and people are mostly OK–Leann mentioned one of their boys has a banged-up foot and there are some cracks in their house. Still, they are very, very busy trying to manage the chaos. Follow their blogs for updates.
Also, check out Leann’s photo album showing some of the scenes from Jacmel. The pictures of the UN refugee camp are particularly saddening.
You have probably heard about the devastating earthquake hit Haiti yesterday. We’re slowly getting news, but it’s clear that this disaster is even worse than the hurricanes that hit the country in 2008. It is estimated that up to 3 million people are now in need of emergency relief.
Kids Against Hunger and its satellites are mobilizing whatever they can to help out. Here is what the South Minneapolis and Bloomington sites are doing and how you can help:
Donations are urgently needed for us to be able to buy and ship more food down there. Between our two satellites the goal for 2010 is to package 1.5 million meals. This will provide meals for 4,100 kids for a year, which would mean 91% of the students currently in the schools we support would get a meal every day. The total cost to purchase, pack, and ship these meals is $345,000. Can you please help?
The organizations we work with also need your support during this crisis. Please consider supporting Lifeline Haiti (which runs the schools) and Joy in Hope (which runs the orphanages).
We are working to add extra packing sessions to our schedule so more volunteers can come and pack food. Stay tuned for the dates and times of the extra sessions.
The Bloomington satellite is holding their first 250,000 Meals Packathon on February 20 and 27. This event was planned before the earthquake, but the need for volunteers is much more urgent now.
We appreciate the work and support that all our volunteers give. Thank you for making a difference in this time of enormous need.
The World Food Programme has a great new video calling for one billion people online to help the one billion people who are hungry. Watch it below, then share it on Facebook or Twitter!
Thanks to everyone for their patience with our Web site. Two weeks before the Packathon is a hard time for our server to crash. But we are back up and running on the site! We have our volunteer and about pages up, and we’ll have more up shortly.
In addition, we have a big announcement to make in the next couple of days…stay tuned!
