Meal-Packing Roadshow – Tales From The Road.

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.

Every September, the Minnesota Bankers Association launches Community Impact Month, which gives member banks a focused period to engage employees in community service activities to showcase the vital role that banks play in their communities. The awesome team from Old National Bank really wanted to do a large-scale, enterprise-wide community service event, but the logistics kept getting in the way.

Fortunately, the team at Meals From The Heart are natural problem solvers.

If you know us, we’re not going to let little (or medium-sized) obstacles get in the way of providing healthy meals to families in need.  Not only did we come up with a solution, working with the folks at Old National Bank, we also came up with an awesome new way to help companies provide a truly fulfilling community engagement project.

We call it the “Meal-Packing Roadshow!”

This September, we packed up the gear, loaded the trucks, gathered our volunteers, and hit the road. Old National and Meals From The Heart created four packing locations during Community Impact Month based on Old National’s Minnesota footprint (Old National has 31 locations in Minnesota): Apple Valley, Montevideo, Plymouth and Waconia. Each location had multiple shifts to engage as many Old National team members and their family members as possible.

And boy was it fun.

This unique “Roadshow” meal-packing event was a huge success. The teams of Old National Bank pack AND delivered over 100,000 (102,576 to be exact) meals to food shelves in their own communities. The beneficiaries of the meals packed by Old National are: Big Lake Food Shelf, Buffalo Food Shelf, CAPI USA in Brooklyn Center, ECHO Food Shelf in Mankato, Keystone Community Services in St. Paul, Madison Food Shelf, Prairie Five Community Action in Montevideo, VEAP in Bloomington, and Waconia Food Shelf.

Sometimes the best outcomes start with overcoming a few pesky obstacles. Is something keeping your organization from facilitating a community service project? Put our team at Meals From The Heart on it. We’ll help you find a solution and you just might find that it’s wayyyy better than you could have ever imagined!

Here are a few pictures from the road. Check out more on our Facebook page.