eNEWS

For the fourth consecutive year, Meals From The Heart has partnered with Beyond The Yellow Ribbon to help Minnesota service members and their families make their grocery budgets go further. The USDA defines food insecurity as the lack of consistent access to enough food for all household members. Many families face difficult choices between essential needs like housing or transportation and purchasing nutritious food. For service members, these challenges are often compounded by the unique demands of military life.

Boy, for a somewhat rainy summer, we couldn’t have been blessed with better weather for our events. Our inaugural fundraising golf tournament, presented by GT Financial, was no exception. Held at the Stillwater Country Club on Monday, August 12, 17 foursomes teed it up under cloudless skies to help us help Minnesota military families stretch their grocery budget. In addition to some excellent (and some less than excellent) golf, the event featured a silent auction, a 50/50 raffle, a post-round dinner buffet, and plenty of good-natured trash-talking.

The river was high, and so were our spirits for our inaugural Pack & Cruise down the St. Croix River. The weather couldn’t have been better as we boarded the classic paddle-wheel river boat, The Empress of the Stillwater River Boats fleet. Over a hundred folks enjoyed great scenery, a delicious dinner, and live 80’s music by Atomic Beat. The main attraction, however, was packing meals for our neighbors. Each “crew member” was teamed up with other sailors to pack for a short session below deck.

Our annual packing expedition to Hidden Pines Ranch is one of our favorite events of the year! Eager smiles and helping hands greeted us when we arrived, ready to go to work and help their neighbors. Hidden Pines Ranch is a summer day camp in Stillwater, Minnesota, where school-age campers experience a wide range of activities, from riding horses to making music and even helping their neighbors by participating in team-building meal-packing events. (That’s where we come in.)

If you’ve participated in a Meals From The Heart meal-packing event, you already know how quickly a packing team can turn ingredients into ready-for-the-shelf packaged meals. It’s not uncommon for a team to pack thousands of meals in a single packing session of thirty minutes or so. Multiply that by several teams over multiple sessions, and the numbers (and boxes) stack up to tens of thousands of meals for just a few hours of packing. In short, it doesn’t take much time to do a whole lotta good for local families.

But the need for speed doesn’t stop after the meals are packed.

Meals From The Heart partnered with Beyond The Yellow Ribbon for a third year to help Minnesota Service members and their families stretch their grocery budget. In 2021 and 2022, we delivered over 30 tons of groceries to military families.

Grocery prices continue to take a bite out of household budgets. Many families, including our military families, have difficulty stretching their food budget from paycheck to paycheck. The Meals From The Heart Food Box program helps families stretch their food budget by offering a selection of familiar and quality grocery items at substantial savings.