As he watched skinny, hungry children fight over food that had fallen to the ground in a Jamaican orphanage years ago, Denny Kinvig realized his volunteer work with the nonprofit organization Feed My Starving Children (FMSC) wasn’t in vain.
In the last fiscal year, 657,000 volunteers packaged 163 million meals that were sent to malnourished people around the world through FMSC. The organization’s dried, fortified meal formulas—developed by food scientists—are responsible for filling empty tummies and saving lives.
Kinvig, who lives in Minnesota near the organization’s headquarters, says in a year’s time, those vitamin-packed meals transformed the lives of the children he met in Jamaica. “We saw how the children were getting healthier and how much they had grown,” he says. “It was like a miracle was happening in front of our eyes.”
Richard Proudfit founded FMSC in 1987, and though the organization began as a Christian nonprofit, Mark Crea, FMSC’s executive director and CEO, says it began to struggle when it “took Christ and put Him in the closet.” It wasn’t until FMSC was rededicated to Christ in 2003, becoming an openly Christian ministry, that it prospered. “God has opened doors and allowed us to feed His kids,” Crea says.
The organization now maintains the highest four-star rating from Charity Navigator, an independent evaluator of ministries. FMSC is 100 percent donor-funded, and with each meal costing just 22 cents to produce, the smallest donation goes far.
“A lot of times, you’re not as impacted if you don’t do something with your hands,” says Melissa Cedeno, sponsor of Mobilepack events, the mobile outreach arm of FMSC. “I am humbled every single time, that God would even find me worthy of being a part of something for the kingdom, which is feeding the hungry children.”
The meals sent by FMSC around the world help to operate orphanages, schools and clinics for the needy.
Bobby and Sherry Burnette, founders of Love a Child, a nonprofit Christian humanitarian organization in Haiti, have received over 14 million meals from FMSC in the last year. With food in Haiti expensive and scarce, the Burnettes depend on outside help to feed all the children they support through their schools, their orphanage and the surrounding villages. FMSC provides the food, and this allows the Burnettes to “focus on the gospel,” Bobby Burnette says.
“It has caused us to be able to reach out … and help more people than we could do on our own,” he says.
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