Frequently Asked Questions
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How does the food get to hungry children, and how can you be sure it gets to them?
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How much of the money that Kids Against Hunger™ raises, go directly to feeding children?
1. What is
Kids
Against Hunger™?
Every hour of every day 12 children per minute die of starvation
or malnutrition related diseases. Kids Against Hunger™ is a 501(c)(3)
nonprofit organization whose mission is to end that tragedy. Kids Against
Hunger™ packages and ships highly nutritious, life-saving meals to starving
and malnourished children in developing counties and the United States. We do
this by mobilizing the energy and caring of American children, teens, and adults
on behalf of hungry children around the world. Kids Against Hunger™
seeks to end the literal hunger of poor children receiving the meals, but also
satisfies a hunger among prosperous Americans, a hunger for meaning and
contribution.
We have a national packaging network made up of our headquarters facility in New
Hope, Minnesota, a packaging division in Mankato, Minnesota, and satellites in
14 states and Canada staffed by volunteers who package the meals. In total, the
packaging network has the capacity to produce over 20 million meals per year. We
also work with other organizations seeking long term solutions to the systemic
causes of hunger. Our aim is for our meals to provide a stable nutritional base
from which the recipient peoples can move their families from starvation to
self-sufficiency. Since its launch, Kids Against Hunger™ has fed about
50 million meals to children in more than 40 countries through the efforts of
over 100,000 volunteers.
2. How was
Kids
Against Hunger™ started?
The organization was founded in March 1999 by Richard Proudfit, a
successful entrepreneur. In 1974 Richard volunteered on a medical mission to
Honduras after Hurricane Fifi had ravaged that country. Profoundly affected by
the starvation he saw among the children there, he made a decision to commit his
life and financial resources to solving the enormous problem of world hunger.
His life's work became clear to him - feed these starving children.
Richard Proudfit enlisted leading executives at Cargill, Pillsbury, General
Mills and Archer Daniels Midland to formulate a food that would meet all the
nutritional requirements of severely malnourished children for physical growth
and mental development. The result was the creation of a balanced, high
nutrition food that can reverse the starvation process, and restore a child's
health and mental alertness.
To learn more about Richard Proudfit, please click
here.
3. What is so special about the food
you package?
The meal ingredients are formulated by food scientists to provide a
rich source of easily digestible protein, carbohydrates and vitamins needed by
an undernourished child's body and mind. The food is also acceptable to the
broad diversity of ethnic tastes and religious differences around the world. The
food offers all nine of the essential amino acids required for complete
nutrition, something that can't be said about other typical food relief sources
such as rice or beans alone. It is also very simple to prepare, requiring only
six cups of boiling water to make a complete meal.
4. What types of people volunteer to
package the food?
While our name implies that children are the source of our volunteers,
in practice our volunteers come from all age groups and walks of life.
Individuals and groups from churches, synagogues, schools, social clubs,
businesses, senior centers and civic groups are common sources of volunteers for
packaging our food. Some of the best volunteer experiences come when children,
parents and grandparents work together as a family. Schools and corporations
often do packaging with us as a community service event.
5. How does the food get to hungry
children, and how can you be sure it gets to them?
We work closely with our distribution partners - churches, nonprofit
organizations and U.S. government agencies operating in poor countries - to
distribute the meals prepared by our volunteers. We seek out organizations that
have proven track records of successfully getting the food to the children and
keeping it out of the hands of corrupt government officials and criminals. We
always require our feeding partners to document how they distributed the food
and provide us with pictures of the children who receive it. In Hastings, we
have partnered with Orphan Grain Train of Nebraska to ship our completed food
boxes to areas in the United States and throughout the world, with the greatest
need.
6. Where have you sent your food?
A partial list of the countries that have received our food are
Afghanistan, Angola, Chad, Columbia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia,
Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, Pakistan, Philippines, Romania, Tanzania and the
Ukraine. We recently shipped more than 1,000,000 of our meals to the Hurricane
Katrina stricken Gulf Coast region in the U.S.
7. As a Christian organization, do you
require the children you feed to be Christians, or your volunteers to be
Christians?
No. We have only one test to feed a child-- "is the child hungry?" We
have only one test for accepting volunteers-- "does the volunteer want to help
feed hungry children?" We require any organization that distributes our food to
give the food freely out of love for the child. To do otherwise would be a
fundamental betrayal of our core beliefs.
8. What other programs does
Kids Against Hunger™ have?
The newest initiative of Kids Against Hunger™ is
Student-to-Student, a school feeding program that matches schools in poor
countries to American schools. The initiative is a powerful combination of a
hunger relief program, a cross-cultural experience for American students, and a
service learning opportunity. A recent study by the International Food Policy
and Research Institute has shown that school feeding programs in impoverished
countries attract children to school and help to retain them once they enroll.
Simultaneously, school feeding improves the child's ability to learn and excel
at school, thereby creating motivation to remain in school. Families of children
in a school feeding program gain food available for the rest of the family by
having the child eat at least one meal at school. The extra food can become
available for a pre-school sibling, or the child's mother, who often is the last
to eat in the poorest of poor famlies.
9. How do you raise the money for your
food?
It costs Kids Against Hunger™ about 25 cents to buy the
ingredients, packaging and shipping for each meal. That means when we ship a
cargo container (about 285,000 meals) to a country, that it costs Kids
Against Hunger™ $66,000. As a nonprofit organization we raise all our funds
from the generosity of individual donors, corporations, churches, synagogues and
foundations. Put simply, the more money we receive from donors, the more
children we can feed.
10. How much of the money that
Kids Against Hunger™ raises, go
directly to feeding children?
Every penny donated to Kids Against Hunger™ of Hastings goes
directly to the purchase of ingredients and supplies to package and ship meals.
We have no additional overhead or administrative costs.