Bemidji Students Pack 23,760 Meals, Surpassing Kids Fighting Hunger Goal

Students from Bemidji public schools and St. Philip's Catholic School blew past their meal-packing goal Friday, filling 23,760 individual servings during a Kids Fighting Hunger event at the Bemidji campus, nearly 2,800 more than the 21,000-meal target organizers had set.

The students, ranging from sixth through eleventh grade, organized into 10 groups of 10 participants each and worked through two pallets of 55 boxes brought to the school by Kids Fighting Hunger, a Central Minnesota nonprofit. By the time the packing wrapped up, all that raw food had been converted into oatmeal and rice meals loaded into 110 boxes, each carrying a three-year shelf life.

The scale of the effort is striking by any measure. According to Kids Fighting Hunger executive director Kevin Warzecha, each packaged meal can feed a family of six, meaning the students' output Friday could positively affect more than 100,000 people.

"The mission of Kids Fighting Hunger is to address food insecurity, serve locally, regionally, nationally, internationally," Warzecha said. "Kids working through the process is as important as the end product ... people understand that they have an obligation throughout their lives to do service work; it's important that they're here in the moment, that they're helping others with no thoughts of themselves."

The 110 boxes will first travel to Food for Kidz, a separate nonprofit based in Stewart, Minn., which will then route the meals to wherever demand is highest. Neither St. Philip's nor Kids Fighting Hunger knew the final destinations at the time of the event. Warzecha said the Food for Kidz distribution chain provides accountability for where the meals ultimately land. "We'll be able to reach right down that line so we know that (the student's) efforts today don't end up with someone that they're not supposed to," he said.

For St. Philip's, the event was woven into the Lenten season as a faith formation project centered on prayer and giving. Libby Olderman, the school's Director of Religious Education, said she hoped the packing event would carry a spiritual dimension alongside the logistical one. "It's going to be within 90 minutes we're gonna pack 21,000, 23,000 meals, so my hope is that maybe we can pray for them and feed them spiritually as well through that," Olderman said.

More than 100 Faith Formation students took part, according to Lakeland PBS, and Olderman made clear she wants Friday's effort to mark a beginning rather than a high point. "We talk to our kids about living a life of service," she said, "that the hope is that they aren't just having one big day, feeling good about themselves, [giving themselves] a pat on their shoulder, but they continue this throughout their whole lives and in small and big ways, in their home and then outside in the community.