SE Missouri

Kids Against Hunger packages highly nutritious, life-saving meals for starving children and malnourished children and their families in developing countries and the United States. The goal of the organization is for its meals to provide a stable nutritional base from which recipient families can move their families from starvation to self-sufficiency. Kids Against Hunger accomplishes this by mobilizing the energy and caring of American children, teens, and adults on behalf of hungry children around the world. Kids Against Hunger seeks to end the literal hunger of children receiving the meals, but also satisfies a hunger among prosperous Americans – a hunger for meaning and contribution.

Fulfilling Kids Against Hunger’s mission requires a vast food packaging capacity to meet an endless demand for food. Because physical constraints of the International Headquarters facility initially prevented further growth in production, the organization began expanding its operations by setting up food packaging “satellites”. Kids Against Hunger believes that the best way to engage the largest number of people is through a decentralized, locally-based network of food packaging satellites that are active in their community. This model engages and empowers people to realize they can make a difference in solving the worldwide problem of starvation and establishes relationships with organizations such as Kiwanis, Rotary, and many faith-based groups of widely varying denominations. This growth strategy also allows the organization to continuously expand its food packaging capacity and volunteer involvement.

The process of establishing a meal packaging satellite is easy. Individuals and groups who are passionate about feeding children license the Kids Against Hunger name, food formulation, and packaging process. This agreement governs product content and quality, as well as adherence to best practices. Each satellite is a separate 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, and all of them are using volunteers in the same manual process to package the standardized food formulation for distribution to dozens of countries all over the globe.

It is Kids Against Hunger’s goal to develop this food packaging network, over the next ten years, with a two-tiered approach of local packaging satellites and regional divisions. The organization seeks to set up 50 divisions and 500 packaging satellites across the USA. Through this structure, Kids Against Hunger expects to generate the capacity to produce over one billion meals per year.

Since its launch, Kids Against Hunger has provided over 1 billion meals for children and their families in more than 60 countries through the efforts of hundreds of thousands of volunteers.