Kids Against Hunger Club packs 50,000 meals during late start

At 8 a.m. Thursday, April 9, juniors were filing into Westside begrudgingly. Soon, they sat down for two hours of solving NeSA math assessment problems.

Meanwhile, 150 Westside freshmen, sophomores, seniors and teachers willingly marched into the Main Gym to help combat another type of problem: child hunger.

Since the beginning of the year, seniors Tyler Schneiderman, Max Slosburg and Carter Ruff have been planning a Kids Against Hunger meal packing event at Westside. Yesterday, their plan came to fruition as 150 volunteers helped Westside’s Kids Against Hunger club pack 50,000 meals to send to various places including the Heart Ministry Center in North Omaha. 50,000 was the club’s goal for the event.

“[The packing event] went very well,” Ruff said. “We made a big difference in our community.”

At the packing event, 15 tables with 10 people at each were lined up along the Main Gym bleachers. At each table was an assembly line set up for the packing: a bin of rice, a bin of protein powder, a bin of dried vegetables, a bin of soy, scales and boxes. The assembly line works like this: one person places a small plastic pouch under a funnel. From there, someone dumps a cup of soy, a spoon of protein, a spoon of vegetables and a cup of rice, in that order. Then, the bags are weighed, rice is either added or subtracted to hit the ideal weight, the bags are sealed and the bags are loaded into a box.

Gallery • 8 Photos

Photo by Aren Rendell

Schneiderman, Slosburg and Ruff were happy to see the event succeed.

“It is reassuring to see that all of our hard was worth it in the end because we ended up with 50,000 meals for the Omaha community,” Slosburg said.

The three have been supervisors at other Kids Against Hunger events, but Schneiderman said having classmates and teachers working with him was an enjoyable experience.

“Having our fellow students and teachers there with us made it all that much better because they got the chance to see how hard we worked to make this event possible,” Schneiderman said. “The most rewarding thing, to me, out of the whole event and planning phase was seeing the boxes of food stocked in the Heart Ministry.”

The Westside event helped kick off the Million Meal March, a Kids Against Hunger campaign aimed at packing over a million meals to be sent to those in need. Slosburg, Schneiderman and Ruff, along with other Westside students, will be participating in other packing events throughout the weekend. Check Wired next week for photos of the Million Meal March.

Kids Against Hunger Packing Event Highlights from Warrior Television on Vimeo.