CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
Volunteers at CMU package meals to ght global hunger
The Walsh boys, Miles, 8 and Jack, 6, were eager to get to work Saturday morning. Wearing red hair nets, they stood before large trays filled with rice and soy, waiting their turns to scoop and pour the food down a funnel and into storage bags. They joined hundreds of other volunteers at Carnegie Mellon University’s annual Rise Against Hunger event in filling bags that will be shipped to other parts of the world to feed communities in need.
Miles thinks of the Roberto Clemente quote his dad taught him, “Any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth.”
“I help whenever I can,” Miles said. On Saturday, more than 450 community members joined CMU students, faculty and staff at Wiegand Gymnasium on campus with the goal of packaging 100,000 meals. The day of service is hosted in partnership with Rise for Hunger, a growing global movement to end hunger and malnutrition.
The parents of the boys, Matt and Katie Walsh, of O’Hara, always look out for handson opportunities to give back. Finding an event backed by the CMU was a plus. Mr. Walsh is a data scientist for the university’s Software Engineering Institute, and Mrs. Walsh works for the student academic success center, so they were excited to support the university and a cause they care about.
“My husband and I met at the Carnegie Mellon library, so we’re kind of a little Tartan family,” Mrs. Walsh said. “It’s a good service opportunity for our whole family. Our kids can do it with us. We try to expose them to as many service opportunities whenever we can.”
The Kraft Heinz Company Foundation has supported Rise Against Hunger since 2013, and CMU became the foundation’s first collegiate partner, in 2015.
Laura Pollanen, program coordinator of basic needs and community initiatives at CMU, said the two-hour annual event has helped bring 500,000 meals to communities
facing food insecurity, malnutrition and child malnutrition over the past nine years.
“I think it’s very, very clear that this community is extremely dedicated to giving back,” she said. “It’s a really important part of student life here. The focus is really just to make sure that we get fortified healthy meals to these communities, and we could not do this without the partnership of Rise Against Hunger and a lot of our student groups.”
The event attracted campus organizations from fraternity and sorority life, to service groups such as Circle K and Partners Allied in Civic Engagement, with many students sporting their group’s T-shirts and sweatshirts.
Among them was senior Nisha Fernandes, who has been involved with the Rise for Against Hunger event for the past three years. As lead coordinator of PACE, she arrived at the gym at 7:30 a.m. to help haul 50pound bags of rice and set up the assembly line across the gymnasium.
“It’s to inspire students to get more involved, and Rise Against Hunger is great because you see the whole community come together,” Ms. Fernandes said. “You see faculty, families, little kids running around. To get people to come on a Saturday morning to volunteer, 400 to 500 people is a phenomenal number. We’re super excited.”
Through each station, volunteers helped to sort, weigh, seal and bag the nutrient-packed meals, which contain soy, rice and dehydrated vegetables. To keep up the momentum, some students started “mini competitions” to see who can pack bags the fastest, Ms. Fernandes said.
“It feels very satisfying because you’re like, ‘I only spent two hours doing this, but the impact that you’re having is like doubled in magnitude,’” she said. “It’s amazing work. It’s just cool to see everyone work together.”
The event can bring greater awareness to global hunger, but Joey Kelly, area manager for Rise Against Hunger’s western Pittsburgh division, said he hopes volunteers will walk away motivated to tackle food insecurity in their own communities.
“The great thing about these events are not only the meals, but also the impact people get to feel,” he said. “We never really know what will come out of these packaging events. You never know what spark it might generate. It puts hunger on the forefront of their mind, like, ‘OK, this is what I did today. What can I do tomorrow?’ ”
Rise Against Hunger targets remote communities within hunger pockets designated “serious” or higher on the Global Hunger Index.
In 2022, the food packed by CMU volunteers went to Haiti. Last year, Raise for Hunger shipped it to the Philippines. While the nonprofit’s work has been focused on West Africa recently, the organization is still determining where this next shipment will go.
Mr. Kelly emphasized that the work goes beyond individual meals. The nonprofit aims to develop sustainable, income-generating initiatives in the areas it serves, such as a school feeding program or community garden.
“Everything that we do at Rise Against Hunger starts with these new packaging events,” Mr. Kelly said. “These meals open the gateway to that sustainability. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do as an organization without partners like Carnegie Mellon.”