By Eliza PARTIKA

Salem Lutheran Church in Glendale recently held its third annual MobilePack event. Around 800 volunteers joined one of nine sessions that were spread across three days, helping to pack as many meals as they could for families in need across the globe. This year, more churches and students participated with volunteers coming to participate from as far away as Bethel Encino Lutheran Church. 

While many of the volunteers have been participating in Salem Lutheran’s MobilePack since it started packing sessions in 2023, many attendees were brand new. Pastor Amie Odahl said Salem Lutheran’s MobilePacks projects have kept growing over the years, and she hopes they will continue expanding. 

Volunteers packed 612 boxes – enough to feed 356 families for one year – exceeding their goal of packing 132,000 individual meals. 

Feed My Starving Children (FMSC), a Minnesota-based Christian non-profit organization, distributes these meals – manna packs made of vegetables, soy, rice and vitamins – to missions, schools and humanitarian aid organizations throughout the world.

For Pastor Kenneth Davis of Bethel Lutheran, participating in this year’s MobilePack was much more than packing food. Raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Davis experienced wealth disparities and hunger disparities firsthand. When he became involved with Feed My Starving Children in Arizona 15 years ago he realized the impact the event made in a culturally relevant way. Instead of merely providing the meal mix – vitamins, vegetables, soy and rice – with water, FMSC travels to the places where the meal packs are distributed and cooks meals with families who receive the food, helping them to integrate the manna packs as an ingredient in their cultural dishes.

“After we cooked the meal with them, we served them the meal and then we sat down and we ate with them. So it was not just, ‘Here’s a handout that we could help you and bye,’ but it was really building community and building relationships so that when you come back, they identify you as a child of God, helping other children of God. So that’s the powerful part about this whole organization. It’s not just air dropping things to people, it’s actually hand-delivering and building relationships and showing the face of God to people,” Davis said. 

Mary Stanford, a member of Salem Lutheran Church, said she enjoys coming to Salem Lutheran’s MobilePacks because of how simple and fun it is to get involved. 

“It’s great to make a difference with something so simple that the whole community can come to. There are so many people we don’t know here and we are all coming together for this cause,” she said. 

Luis Melendez, a community member, has attended all three MobilePacks events with his teenage daughters. 

“It’s amazing that with so little time we can have such a great impact on so many kids around the world,” he said. 

Davis said the experience was much more than packing meals; it’s about helping the hungry everywhere and bucking some of the misconceptions about hunger.

“The reality is that people are hungry and you don’t have to go across the waters to find people who are hungry. We can live right in America, in Downtown LA, on Skid Row, and see people [who] are hungry. And this is not a handout. [There is a misconception that] these people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and just have some drive and initiative. Well, how do you expect people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they don’t even have boots? So those misconceptions we have of the homeless and the unhoused – people don’t choose to eat out of [trashcans]. They are desperate situations that force them to be in that situation,” he said. 

Lysette Guardian, a member of Feed My Starving Children in Arizona, said she has worked with FMSC, and with Salem Lutheran, each year because of the great impact they have on people who are food insecure. 

“I can see how much they love this mission, and how much they love their community,” Guardian said. “Growing up, I didn’t always have access to food myself, so food in general is a very important thing to me. If you asked me as a kid, if I thought that growing up I’d be able to make a difference to kids in the same situation around the world, it makes me feel empowered,” she said. 

Community members wishing to know more can go to the Feed My Starving Children website at https://www.fmsc.org/. For those wishing to donate to Salem Lutheran’s MobilePack, visit https://www.fmsc.org/ways-to-give/donate-to-a-MobilePack.