The Hillsdale College GOAL Program will hold a meal-packing event from 2-4 p.m. on Sunday in the Biermann Athletics Center. GOAL is holding the event through Numana, an international, hunger-relief organization based in Kansas. The goal of the event is to package 20,000 meals, which will feed 80 children in Haiti for an entire school year.
GOAL Program Director senior Allison Deckert is helping oversee the event.
“We like to have a large-scale volunteering event,” Deckert said. “This is a really cool opportunity for large numbers of students from very diverse circles of campus to come together and work on volunteering together.”
Senior Emma Carville volunteered at the event last year and enjoyed her experience.
“The event was really great. It was a really big deal on campus,” Carville said.
Hillsdale supplies the volunteers, but Numana provides the meals.
“They get the food here, they bring the supplies to pack it, and then they ship it back out,” Deckert said.
This is the second year GOAL has hosted this event. Deckert said fundraising has been the biggest challenge. GOAL needed to have $4,800 by April 13, but by April 9 it had about a thousand.
“We realized that we had to raise $3,700 in a single week,” Deckert said. “But we made it.”
GOAL also employed a text-to-donate system for this event.
In the future, GOAL may be searching for an alternative event that would draw campus together but not require as many funds.
“We would want it to be community-based, and we would want it to be less fundraising,” Deckert said.
Mission of Hope, a missions organization to Haiti, will distribute the meals on the ground in Haiti.
Numana held 63 meal-packing events last year all around the U.S. Morgan Bolander, a Numana Event Coordinator, will oversee the event.
“It’s awesome that people all across the U.S. are fully aware of the international need of food,” Bolander said. “And the willingness just to give and pour out – it’s incredible.”
Bolander supervised the meal-packing on campus last year and said she looks forward to round two.
“Hillsdale students are absolutely some of the most hard-working people I have come across,” Bolander said. “We felt very welcomed and at home there.”
