Children in the Philippines receive nutritious meals through the nonprofit Feed My Starving Children. Palisades resident are sought to help pack food.
Photo: Feed My Starving Children
Lutheran Pastor Kenneth Davis Seeks a Record
If you can spare two hours on Thursday, June 20, you could help pack food for “Feed My Starving Children (FMSC).”
“This is a great community, and one of the biggest challenges for people is the giving of time,” said Palisades Lutheran Church Pastor Kenneth Davis. “People wonder how they can give back. This is a real tangible way of doing it.”
The goal of the nonprofit FMSC is “to eradicate hunger one person at a time.” Pastor Davis told Circling the News, “We want to shatter our record of 2017,” when 287 volunteers hand-packed 88,560 meals.
This year, 400 volunteers are needed to reach a goal of 108,900 MobilePack meals. Monsignor Liam Kidney of Corpus Christi Catholic Church is joining forces with Davis and the packing event will be held at Corpus, 880 Toyopa.
“Thanks go to Father Kidney and the Corpus Community for the use of their space,” Davis said.
Food packets are prepared and sent to countries where children are in need of food. Photo: Feed My Starving Children
Davis explained that packaging the food is like working on an assembly line, with each person doing one job repeatedly, like maybe adding rice or sealing the bag.
The scientifically-designed meals will then be distributed to schools, orphanages and clinics in 70 countries.
After his wife died, Davis took his three daughters on missions to different areas of the world, such as Belize, Panama, Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Mexico. While in Belize and then again in El Salvador, “we distributed the packages to the village,” Davis said. “We were so impressed with FMSC.”
He started thinking about it and wondered, “What if we hosted a packing event?”
With a MobilePack event, about $25,000 must be raised to bring in the truck, supplies and equipment for the one-day operation.
“So far we have raised $8,000, so we need another $17,000 before June 1 to purchase all of the packing material,” Davis said.
The following sponsors have already made donations: Palisades Lutheran, Palisades Presbyterian, Corpus Christi Church, the Palisades Interfaith Council, the Palisades Optimist Club, American Legion Post 283 and La Casa de Cristo Lutheran Church in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Lutheran Pastor Kenneth Davis
FMSC is a Christian nonprofit that has addressed world hunger since 1987. The meals are specifically designed to reverse and prevent malnutrition.
In 2015, more than one million volunteers packed nearly 273 million meals through FMSC’s permanent sites and the nationwide MobilePack program. The Minnesota-based charity spends 92 percent of total donations directly on feeding the hungry and has earned the highest 4-star rating from Charity Navigator for 11 consecutive years.
Contact Davis at (310) 459-2358. To sponsor, donate or volunteer, visit the Palisades Lutheran Church website: plc.cc.