A program of the Wesley Foundation
Kids Against Hunger – Champaign/Urbana
?A Registered Student Organization at the University of Illinois
In its first year of operation, Illini Fighting Hunger (IFH) has provided significant aid to food pantries in Eastern Illinois, surpassed many of its operational goals, and paved the way for continued community support in the fight against hunger at home and abroad. In cooperation with ten distinct event hosts sponsoring fifteen meal-packaging projects, IFH engaged 2,181 volunteers in the packaging of over 235,000 meals throughout the 2012-2013 academic year. For its efforts, IFH received the 2013 McKinley Foundation Social Justice Honorable Mention.
Our largest project, the Community and Campus Day of Service, brought together residents of Champaign County and students, staff, and faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to package an in-house “Illinois” meal created by the University’s National Soybean Research Laboratory. In 6 hours, over 1,000 volunteers packaged 81,044 meals to help fight hunger in Illinois! Plans are already underway for CCDOS 2014!
IFH has also partnered with local organizations to provide long-grain white rice to the Wesley Evening Food Pantry for distribution at their monthly pantry. We are also working on forming a Distribution Team to help at the Evening Food Pantry by offsetting volunteer needs.
In the long term, we are pursuing the implementation of Illini Swiping Out Starvation, a credit-donation program that enables students and faculty of the University to donate a portion of their weekly meal credits to IFH so that we may finance our own meal-packaging events and increase our ability to raise student awareness on hunger issues in Illinois and around the world.
Recently, we have partnered with the newly created Newman Shares Student Pantry to ensure that its shelves are always stocked with Kids Against Hunger meals and white rice to serve students who are facing food insecurity.
Finally, we are working with several Registered Student Organizations, the Greek system on campus, and other community groups to facilitate monthly packaging events that will help maintain our output of meals and packaged rice for distribution.
For more information please visit us at: www.illinifightinghunger.org
Connect with us on Facebook: Illini Fighting Hunger
Connect with us on Twitter: @iFightHunger