Feeding the Need

Sacrificing fashion for community service, Terps from across campus and the community are donning hairnets to fill hundreds of thousands of bags of nutritious meals for families in need—locally and in hurricane-ravaged North Carolina.

Terps Against Hunger, a student-run nonprofit that fights food insecurity in the D.C. region, is hosting its fifth annual Homecoming Week community service project yesterday and today in the Stamp Student Union’s Grand Ballroom with the goal of packing 400,000 meals. Since the organization formed on campus in 2013, its total has exceeded 2.35 million meals.

Volunteers, including students, staff and faculty, parents, alumni and local high schoolers, are forming assembly lines measuring and packaging meals of rice, soy protein, vitamins and dehydrated vegetables.

A portion will be then distributed to local children and families by partners including the Capital Area Food Bank, Maryland Food Bank and D.C. Central Kitchen. But with the help of the nonprofit Good360, the vast majority—250,000 meals—will go to Hurricane Florence victims in North Carolina, says Terps Against Hunger founder and advisory board chair Jonathan Fix '16.

"We recognize there's a huge need for meals in an area that’s currently underserved, and we have the ability to effect some change there," he said.  

This Do Good event runs today from 9:45 a.m. to 5 p.m. Slots are still available for volunteers, and shifts are as short as one hour and 15 minutes. Register here.

Find out more about all of this week’s Homecoming events at homecoming.umd.edu.