By Jordan Hafford | [email protected]

In a well-known, sleepy little shopping village that revolves around wholesome family fun, it is not with great surprise that one finds the fifth annual charity event to feed starving children. 

More than 1,000 volunteers showed up to make this charity a success, and they did not disappoint. They ended up packing 357,696 meals, which equates to feeding 980 children for an entire year. 

Feed My Starving Children is a member of Global Impact’s charity alliance and has shipped more than 2.2 billion nutritious meal formulas worldwide. 

Angie Gerdes, president and owner of Gardner Village in West Jordan, loves the Feed My Starving Children charity. 

“Gardner Village had been looking for a charity to be involved in, and this turned out to be a perfect fit for our facility here,” she said. “We contributed the space as well as over $20,000 to the cause because we believe so strongly in it.” 

The food packing was done inside the popular event venue at Gardner Village called The Gathering Place and was completed in four separate sessions over two days. By the time volunteers finished, they had filled one-and-a-half semi trucks. 

Each meal cost only 22 cents to pack and send, and they were all paid for by different groups or companies who sponsored the packs. 

Maureen Evans, along with her husband, Bob, are the local Pack Sponsors for Kids Feeding Kids, a nonprofit organization partnering with Feed My Starving Children. She said of the effort, “There’s such a difference between feeding children and feeding children who would not have a meal otherwise. Six-thousand two-hundred children a day die from starvation around the world, and we intend to make a dent in that year after year.”

At last year’s event, the food had been shipped directly to the Philippines, in which volunteers had fed 744 children for an entire year. Within two weeks, the food will be in children’s tummies somewhere out of the country.

While officials don’t know yet where this year’s batch will be headed, the Feed My Starving Children organization has a 99 percent success rate of getting the food right to where they want it to go. It is a Christian organization, so it goes to the church missionaries first who pray over all the food. 

“Feed My Starving Children really believes in the power of prayer and that it’s God’s work to try to feed these children,” Gerdes said.

Gardner Village always strives to create wonderful moments from its rich heritage and family atmosphere. People spend afternoons milling about the historic shopping and dining village enjoying its simple charm daily. The Feed My Starving Children charity is placed here annually to offer the opportunity to give back to the less fortunate. 

“We hope for people to come away from this realizing how blessed they truly are, especially the younger generations that come to help who don’t necessarily realize yet that not everyone has a refrigerator full of food to raid,” Maureen Evans said.