More than 350,000 volunteers package meals through Rise Against Hunger’s meal packaging program every year. It is a fun, hands-on service project that is suitable for all ages.
Our assembly process combines rice, soy, dehydrated vegetables and a flavoring mix including 23 essential vitamins and minerals into small meal packages. These meal packages are shipped around the world to support school feeding programs and crisis relief. The food stores easily, transports quickly and has a shelf-life of two years. For more information on our meals and how they are distributed, please visit our Impact page.
Ready to schedule an event? Visit our Contact page to find your local warehouse location.
What You’ll Need
Here are the four things you’ll need to host your own event.
- Volunteers. Each volunteer can package between 125 and 150 meals per hour. We work with volunteer groups of all sizes and recommend talking to your local program about the number of volunteers and the timing of your event. We also request a small team of volunteers for setup and clean-up help.
- Funding. Each meal costs only $.29. We have some tools to help you fundraise this cost, and recommend setting your meal target based on the number of volunteers and the timing. For example, 80 volunteers x 125 meals per hour x 2 hours = 20,000 meals. 20,000 meals x $.29 = $5,800.
- Space. Approximately 20 sq. foot per volunteer and it must be indoors with access to 110-volt outlets. We will be arriving with 1,500 lbs. of ingredients for every 10,000 meals we package. Identifying the best location to off load and reload a truck will be helpful to your event facilitator. Our trucks are between 24 and 32 feet long, and we will need a place to park them for the duration of the event. Including these instructions in your proposal can be helpful.
- Tables. Our packaging event requires one rectangular table for every five volunteers.
Your local Rise Against Hunger Program Manager will provide detailed instructions at the start of your meal packaging event, but this video provides an overview of what to expect.
Getting Started: Meal Packaging Event Proposal
To begin the planning process for your event, we’ll need all the relevant information to input into our database.
Once we receive this information we will work to input your information, ask any questions we might have, and schedule your event.
Please click here to download and complete the form. Once completed, save and return to your local warehouse. Visit our Contact page for a complete list of our locations.
Once we have all the pertinent details we need for your event we will send you a Memorandum of Understanding or Statement of Work to be signed by both parties. The completion of this will confirm your event and we can set-up your volunteer registration and fundraising page.
Other Important Documents:
Food Safety Instructions
Registration and Liability Waiver Form
Promoting Your Event
We’ve provided a variety of tools to help you promote your upcoming meal packaging event. Please visit our Multimedia Toolkit for resources including photos, videos, logos and printer-friendly posters to help you spread the word about your upcoming event.
What to Expect on the Day of Your Event
The day of your event, you can expect a truck to arrive at the designated set-up time (usually 1-2 hours before start) with a Rise Against Hunger staff person as a facilitator.
The facilitator will coordinate all aspects of the event including:
- Setting up the tables and stations (View our Assembly Line Flow Chart)
- Introducing Rise Against Hunger and the response to the issue of global hunger
- Training volunteers on the meal packaging process
- Ensuring quality of the meals produced
- Cleaning up the equipment we brought and reloading the truck
We encourage playing music at your event and most times will be able to bring a sound system to facilitate that. If you would like to put together a playlist for packaging we recommend high energy music. We will bring a gong with us to hit as we count up the number of meals we have packaged.
We also bring t-shirts and hats for sale, the proceeds of which benefit Rise Against Hunger’s work with our partners worldwide.
Setting Up the Room
Setting up the room prior to your Rise Against Hunger facilitator’s arrival is not necessary, but if you are looking to set-up the tables before arrival we have supplied table diagrams to help you in doing so.
We recommend contacting your program manager with room dimensions with plugs and doors outlined particularly the door closest to where the truck will be parked so that they can appropriately direct you on which floor plan to use. If you have any questions, or have a volunteer number that does not match the below, please do not hesitate to ask us.
Download our Table Diagrams
40 Volunteer Table Diagram
80 Volunteer Table Diagram
120 Volunteer Table Diagram
200 Volunteer Table Diagram
