March 28, 2024

PCM students, Meals from the Heartland team up to fight hunger

PRAIRIE CITY — PCM Middle School sixth-graders Erin Van Peursem and Lauran Schut dip scoops in to boxes of rice and soy, measure out several ounces and dump the commodities through a funnel into plastic bags.

The 12-year-old Peursem and 11-year-old Schut stood at a table of 10 other PCM middle schoolers Friday, wearing hairnets, sealing bags and taping boxes in the middle school gymnasium. The space was transformed Friday into an assembly line and mobile hunger fighting center. The goal was to package 30,000 meals in three hours for children in impoverished areas of South Africa.

"My table got one box done, and it looks like we're going to get a second box. That's 36 bags of food," Van Peursem said. "We're going to keep packaging meals for the hungry."

Friday's packaging effort was organized through the West Des Moines nonprofit Meals from the Heartland and is the culmination of nearly a semester of fundraising for PCM Middle School's service learning class.

The PCM sixth-graders raised nearly $3,000 with their "Weekend of Service" earlier this school year making care bags, decorating blankets and assembling shoe repair kits for those in need with the goal of securing the nonprofit's matching grant to fund Friday's event. A donation drive last week involving the entire middle school student body raised the final $500 to put the service learning class over the $3,000 threshold.

Joel O'Dell is hunger fight manager with Meals for the Heartland. He said the organization's 2014 packaging events produced and shipped nine million meals to impoverished areas of South Africa, Haiti, Philippines and parts of Central America. But the hungry here at home were not forgotten. One million meals were shipped locally throughout central Iowa. Ingredients cost 20 cents per bag, O'Dell said.

Meals from the Heartland began in 2008 with an annual event, packaging four to five million meals at Hy-Vee Hall. In 2010, the group branched out with mobile events — like Friday's packaging effort in Prairie City — where the nonprofit brings their program to churches, schools and businesses.

"We're doing events all the time, almost every day," O'Dell said. "We have our own packaging center and warehouse now where we can package and make mass quantities of meals."

Contact Mike Mendenhall at mmendenhall@myprairiecitynews.com