foodforkidz

Before now, St. John’s Mwongeti Village in Kenya has never had its own medical clinic. With a population of approximately 6,000 residents, people were forced to walk an hour to get to the closest medical facility. All that will change within about a month’s time, as the village welcomes its first Dispensary (the local term for medical clinic). Food For Kidz -Stewart MN is pleased to have had a hand in this life-changing project.

The Excitement is Building!

Teaming up to make this a reality is a group of people in St. John’s Mwongeti Village and friends in the United States who brought together Food For Kidz, the Bergquist Foundation, Hutchinson Rotary, Kino Rotary, and Rotary International. A little over a year ago, a multi-use building called the Village Market was built to house a community library and maze mill. With space remaining in the building, the vision of a medical clinic continued to take shape. Food for Kidz donated $5,500 to purchase instrumentation and supplies for the Dispensary. The Rotary Clubs donated funds and secured a matching grant to purchase medical equipment and furnishings for the Dispensary. With the electrical and water systems complete, an incinerator installed and a latrine built, the Dispensary just erected its signage letting the villagers know it soon would be open.

When the funds arrive in the next few days, the local project manager in St. John’s Mwongeti Village will oversee the completion of the Level 1 clinic, and it should open within a month. An RN will staff the clinic, until growth is established and Level 2 status will allow for their equivalent of a Physicians Assistant to join the staff.

St. John’s Mwongeti Village: Past and Future

The vision for advancing this community continues, as a pharmacy is planned next and hopefully staffed with a Pharmacist. Food For Kidz has a history of helping this village grow through charitable donations dating back to the construction of the Village Market housing the library and maze mill. We donated funds for the mill and shipped 1,800 books to stock the library. Today, people come from neighboring villages to read, research, and use the library space and books.Women are able to mill maze without walking over 2 hours to do so!

Food for Kidz has officially partnered up with Agape Ministries in Othello Washington expanding their reach to deliver meals to central Washington.

This new partnership will help get nutritious meals to the smaller communities that are struggling with hunger. Agape already reaches out towards the Canadian border and overseas to their Ministry in the Philippines. Continuing to grow here will allow us to take care of those locally as well as planning to ship overseas.

After seeing what Food for Kidz is all about and seeing that we are taking a bite out of hunger they have asked us to partner up with them to help grow with them in our community.

As of July 1 our new warehouse will be in Eastpoint’s 76,000 square-foot building which encompasses three churches as well as our new warehouse. This new warehouse and packing facility will allow us to create an unlimited amount of meals to send out to food banks, Schools, churches and those in need.

Beginning July 12 we will offer Meal Packing at this location.

Please join us or donate which will allow us to continue to create meals even if you can’t make it.

Our goal is to get food to kids, families and those in need.

After months of planning and anticipation on June 1, 2018, Food For Kidz opened a Spokane, Washington office and warehouse! This new secondary location will be used to promote, organize, create and service meal packing events around the Spokane, WA and surrounding areas.

Food for Kidz mission is to bring awareness of hunger to the community

We bring awareness by using education and involving others in the participation of packing nutritious meals then distributing them to local food banks, schools and charities.

On May 29th Food For Kidz sent an entire semi load of bulk food to Spokane, Washington from Stewart, Minnesota in anticipation of opening an office and warehouse there. Upon arrival on the 31st, 21 pallets of bulk food equaling 300,000 meals were unloaded into a warehouse.

A total of 10 volunteers and the owner John Neisen of Food For Kidz immediately set up two packing lines in preparation for creating meals that night. This ensured meals could go out to those in need the following day. As music played in the background one volunteer was overheard saying, “This feels really good to give back and help those in need! We want to do this again.”.

In just 1.5 hours 1,297 meals were created and packed. The following day, HRC Ministries of Spokane, WA distributed the food to two local schools and one food bank.

If your child is five years old, and someone asked you if you’re planning for their High School Graduation already, your response is likely no. While it’s true you are not planning the reception and choosing where to celebrate, you are laying the ground work to help your child graduate from High School. From teaching valuable life lessons and learning to read, to teaching responsibility and how to be a good friend, you are helping ready your child for later in life.

The same parallel can be drawn to helping the people of natural disasters, like the people of Nepal. While Food For Kidz does not have food being distributed yet in the hardest hit areas of Nepal, valuable leg work is being done to help the people hardest hit by the devastating Earthquake. As with all emergency situations, we all want to act as quick as possible. Food For Kidz is no different. However, we are very careful not to inhibit emergency relief organizations that are already best positioned to help. Limited resources like communication, transportation, and airports are overwhelmed in the first few days and weeks following such a disaster.
In Nepal,  the International agencies are responding with aid which are overwhelming customs and the infrastructure of the country. It will take several months for the logistics to clear and transportation problems to be rectified before shipment of our food is expected.

The GOOD NEWS is that Food For Kids does have routes planned for shipment through India and on to Kathmandu when it is possible to send shipments of food. We can plan now for food packing events for response to this tragic situation.  Either donating to Food For Kidz or helping package food as soon as possible, will help thousands of people in the months to come!  Shipments to Nepal will be ready in several months.The need is great and will be ongoing for quite some time.

We also never know when another natural disaster like this will strike, and helping package food now helps speed the process along later when we need to act quickly. Please check on the next event nearest you, consider scheduling your own food packing event, or read about other ways you can help.