Volunteers package over 100,000 meals at the Cure Arena to help fight hunger

On Thursday 825 volunteers donning gloves, hairnets, and bright red t-shirts came together at the Cure Arena to help alleviate hunger by packaging over 120,000 dehydrated meals for the “Trenton Plates, The World Takes” event to send out to countries across the world impacted by hunger.  

Sponsored by Rise Against Hunger, an international humanitarian organization that targets remote, last-mile communities within hunger pockets designated “serious” or higher on the Global Hunger Index, and Cross Community, Inc, a faith-based Trenton organization that was formed to reach across communities to help those in need, the two organizations joined forces to “package” hope. The meal packaging event brought together local volunteers who were all ready to pitch in and be of service including high school students from Trenton, Ewing, and Princeton.

“People are really concerned about the world, and they are more concerned than we might think,” said Cross Community co-founder, Rob Ross. “This [event] is a wonderful way to love on people.” Ross attributed the commitment of the volunteers to aid in the fight against hunger as the reason why people were eager to join the movement.  

Kenneth Austin, “Trenton Plates, The World Takes” event coordinator and Cross Community board treasurer, said that he was astonished at the turnout which more than doubled the number of expected volunteers they sought to help package meals over the course of three shifts, which began at 7 a.m. and was expected to last until 8 p.m. 

“All of these meals will be packaged here at Cure Arena,” said Stone Powell-McDavitt, Partnership Manager for Rise Against Hunger. Each pre-packaged meal is fortified with 20 essential vitamins and nutrients and contains rice, soy, and dehydrated vegetables. “We wanted this to be a community event and Cross Community decided that they wanted to span the event so more people could attend,” Powell-McDavitt noted on how the event was able to attract so many volunteers in one day. After all the meals were packaged at Cure Arena, they were transported to the Rise Against Hunger warehouse in Philadelphia and then shipped throughout the world to places in need, such as Uganda, Haiti, and Cambodia. 

“These dry meals are turned into some pretty amazing dishes especially once you get to see that culture influences how they make the [meal]. I’ve seen some of the meals that are made from some of these [pre-packaged goods] and I’m like ‘Wow,’ I would have never thought this would be the end product,” said Austin.

Austin said the idea to bring the event to Trenton was born out of an experience in middle school when he took a mission trip to North Carolina with his church to participate in a meal packaging event to feed the hungry. “At the time the [organization’s name] was Stop Hunger Now, but I was able to look them up and realized that they [changed their name], but it was the same organization that I worked with many years ago. I was like ‘This is something that I would love to see come to Trenton and immediately I thought about the “Trenton Makes, The World Takes” slogan. We have to constantly bring life to that slogan, and that’s where the name of the event came from, bringing together a community to do this thing that’s produced in Trenton that gets its way out to the world.”  Austin said that he has already received interest in producing another event next year.

A common question Austin received as he embarked on producing the volunteer event was the reason why he decided to partner with an international organization to help fight hunger around the world when there are many locals in need of food. “That is a real issue and it’s not to say that we can’t focus on both issues at one time, which is why we have a global initiative and a local initiative happening at the same time,” he said, noting a food drive collaboration with Arm in Arm and TASK that coincided as volunteers prepackaged meals. “Hopefully by doing events like this we can bring more like-minded people together so we can do more things for the City of Trenton and Mercer County as it relates to fighting hunger. The main thing that we want to take away from this event is that hunger is a real thing that could and should be eliminated.”