eNEWS

At the heart of what makes Meals From The Heart a truly unique and incredible organization are the hearts that keep the good work flowing. And you’d be hard-pressed to find bigger hearts than the ones beating inside Wayne and Ken. Ken Hanson and Wayne Pepin have been volunteering with Meals From The Heart almost from day one. From coaching meal-packing teams and lugging 50-pound bags of rice to loading trucks and delivering bags of food throughout the community, their busy hands are matched only by their massive hearts and warm smiles.

When you learn more about WHY these guys volunteer, you’ll know a lot more about who these guys are! READ ON!

Wow! It’s hard to believe, we’ve been packing for a decade with our friends from the Long Island Lutheran Middle and High Schools (LuHi). This past October marked the tenth year when over 800 volunteers, including the entire student body, faculty, and staff, packed over 197,000 meals that were delivered to Island Harvest and local pantries. These meals helped individuals and families on Long Island struggling with food insecurity as we all continue to navigate this pandemic.

This holiday season Meals From The Heart is working with two great military organizations to help ensure that military and their families can enjoy traditional holiday meals at home. With a slight modification to the Meals From The Heart FOOD BOX program, volunteers are filling over 1,100 grocery bags loaded with traditional holiday and seasonal food items to distribute to military families for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

As prices increase at the grocery stores, many families, including our military families, have a difficult time stretching their food budget to last until their next paycheck. A report presented by the Senate Appropriations Committee last month reveals that one in eight military families were food insecure prior to the pandemic and this number has now grown to one in five.

Meals From The Heart has gained quite a reputation in the area business community for being the go-to group when a company wants to combine fun, team-building, and community service into one easy-to-execute event. In fact, we pretty much have it down to a science. We bring everything needed from the meals to the tables. All the organization needs to provide is a space to pack, eager meal packers, funding, and about an hour of time. Wham bam, easy-peasy.

But what happens when a company’s team is scattered all over the place in different branches, locations, and even cities? Getting all employees in one place at one time would potentially mean having to temporarily close locations and have employees travel several hours to pack meals for an hour. Most often, those just aren’t great options. After all, while community service is a high priority in most companies, it isn’t feasible to shut down operations for even a brief time.

At Meals From The Heart, we take a great deal of pride in our work to help keep nutritious and good-tasting food on dinner tables throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin. We have always placed a very high premium on the flavor and quality of our meals – from recipes developed by an experienced local chef (Thanks, Peggy!) to the quality ingredients.

When it comes to implementing meal-packing events, Meals From The Heart is a well-oiled machine. From set-up to clean-up, our dedicated team of volunteers transform spaces into meal-packing factories – organizing the packers, stocking ingredients, keeping the lines moving, and ultimately delivering boxes of packed meals to local food shelves.

At Meals From The Heart, we also are always looking for fun, new ways to combat the severe issue of hunger in our communities. So, when we started organizing meal-packing events at area businesses and corporations, we quickly saw an opportunity to up our game. That’s when we designed a meal-packing event specifically for employee groups – ideal for team building, boosting morale, and strengthening relationships.