Help feed hungry children here with MUST Ministries

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Kaye Cagle, Dir. of Marketing

770-790-3876

Help feed hungry children here with MUST Ministries

(May 28, 2013 - MUST Ministries) --- With 11,128 students eligible for the free and reduced lunch program in Paulding county, MUST Ministries is working to rescue hungry children again this summer by providing and delivering sack lunches to various housing neighborhoods.

“This is our eighteenth year to provide meals,” said Chris Butler, MUST coordinator for Paulding. “We plan to serve 500 children each week day totaling 25,000 meals, but we need community support,” she said.

Lunches are made by churches, businesses, clubs, neighborhoods, sports teams and families who want to help. A detailed list of what goes in each lunch and the daily menu is posted on the MUST web site at www.mustministries.org, she explained. Then the lunches are taken to host sites where packers and checkers perform a quality control check, making sure each lunch has a sandwich, a sweet, a salty and a juice box. Sandwiches are repacked in bread sleeves after                                             being assembled and put in cold storage, so they must be added to the sack just before delivery.

“One of the most meaningful ways to volunteer is to become a driver,” Butler said. Each week day, the drivers load their cars with the lunches and drive a pre-appointed route where children wait for the meal. “When they see us, it’s like Christmas! The children come running and the driver and a helper distribute the lunches. On Fridays, we also hand out free books for the children to help them continue to read during the summer.”

Eighteen summers ago, a teacher came to MUST who was concerned about what her students would eat during vacation. She asked MUST to provide the meals and she promised to personally deliver them to her students. She helped 25 children that summer, but today, the MUST program spans eight counties. What is the sack lunch goal? 250,000!

People who want to participate in this important project can also donate online via the MUST web site or donate supplies. The ministry needs peanut butter, jelly, bread, juice boxes, individually packed salty snacks and sweet snacks, baggies and paper bags. “Even your young children can help by decorating lunch bags for other children,” Butler said. “It’s an easy way to get your whole family involved in helping others.”

We recently spoke to a teenager who told us she used to walk a mile to get a MUST sack lunch in the summers. She lived with an older sister and brother, but they had no food. She said the MUST team not only brought nourishment, but also encouragement, telling her that God loved her and was going to take care of her. She says MUST helped her become the young lady she is today, a strong, confident person happily adopted and doing well.

MUST is grateful to the host sites in Paulding who are working hard to provide some of the volunteers and space to support the outreach. Special thanks to the staff and congregations at Hope Church, First United Methodist Church of Dallas and the staff of CAYA Ministries.

For more information on how to help in Paulding, please email cbutler@mustministries.org.