By David Rogers. BLOWING ROCK, N.C. — Bring three Blowing Rock churches together and nearly 100 volunteers from those congregations and you can get a lot done. That was evident on Nov. 5 when Rumple Memorial Presbyterian, St. Mary of the Hills Episcopal and Blowing Rock Methodist got together at the Blowing Rock School gymnasium to assemble and package meals for Rise Against Hunger.
Representing Rise Against Hunger, David Thomas-Bush was on hand to orchestrate the packing event, which for the last several years has become an annual endeavor of the churches.
“They will pack 20,099 meals within two hours,” said Thomas-Bush. “As an organization, Rise Against Hunger sends everything out internationally. For example, the last two containers that I sent out from our Charlotte location, one went to Madagascar and the other went to The Philippines.”
The need around the world remains immense, Thomas-Bush explained, but distribution is purposeful.
“We send meals to places that are the most vulnerable, primarily to school feeding programs,” he said. “If we’re just handing out meals we aren’t really solving the problem of hunger. Education goes a long way toward breaking the cycle of poverty. We also have sustainability projects, whether that is teaching people in a community how to grow their own food or producing a water well, or building a tilapia farm.”
Rise Against Hunger is headquartered in Raleigh, with meal packing operations in Raleigh in Charlotte and 20 locations in the U.S that organize volunteers for meal packing events like the one in Blowing Rock.
“I believe our Charlotte location has organized more than 140 meal packing events like this one, this year,” said Thomas-Bush.
With help from local events like the one in Blowing Rock, in 2022 Rise Against Hunger distributed more than 67.6 million meals worldwide, including to Zimbabwe, Malawi, South Sudan, Honduras, Tanzania, and South Africa, among others like the aforementioned Madagascar and The Phillippines.
According to the latest FAO report on “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World,” as many as 783 million people are facing hunger, globally.
