What if, when you set foot in the Market Place this afternoon or opened your fridge, there wasn’t any food to be found? What would that feel like? What does hunger feel like?

According to Kids Against Hunger, a nonprofit organization with a mission to significantly reduce the number of hungry children in the U.S. and to feed starving children throughout the world, 17,000 children under the age of five die every day due to starvation and hunger-related diseases. Just to put it in perspective, that means that about seven times the number of students at Gustavus die every day because they don’t have food to eat.

Gustavus Greeks are working to make a dent in the number of children who go without nutritional food every day. For the last three years, all of Gustavus’ fraternities and sororities have worked together to package food and raise money for Kids Against Hunger.

This year, on Sept. 20, the students participating in the Greek pledging process volunteered at the Kids Against Hunger office in Mankato, where they packaged enough fully nutritional meals to feed 21,384 starving children around the world.

Junior Elementary Education Major Andrea Stevens, a member of Theta Xi Gamma and community service chair for Inter-Greek Senate said, “while you are busy packaging the food … you truly feel like you are physically making a difference in the world. Many times throughout the process the person in charge would tell everyone to stop what they were doing and would give them an update on how many starving children they had fed so far. This was a great way to inspire the Greeks and make them realize that what they were doing was really making a difference.”

Packaging food is only one aspect of what the Greeks do to fight hunger in the United States and around the world. For the last few years, the Greeks have served as ushers at the Nobel Conference and have donated the $1000 dollars that they earn to Kids Against Hunger.  Even though each individual meal only costs 23 cents, the amount of money that it cost Kids Against Hunger to pay for all of the meals the Greeks packaged is $4,918.32. The money the Greeks donate from their service at the Nobel Conference and other fundraisers helps Kids Against Hunger offset the cost of the packaged meals.

“Working at Nobel put the Greeks in the spotlight and was a great opportunity for us to express our core values while working for a great cause,” said Justin VerMeer, a sophomore biology major who is also a pledge for the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.

The Greeks also trick-or-treat for cans in the St. Peter neighborhoods on Oct. 30 every year, which has yielded 4,500 pounds of food for the St. Peter Area Food Shelf.

“All the fundraising is significant  not only to the Greeks but also for me personally because I think it is really important for everyone to positively influece the community around us and help in any way we can,” said Brianna Heinrich, a member of the Delta Phi Omega sorority.

Additionally, the Greeks sponsor Donate-a-Meal, which gives Gustavus students the opportunity to donate to Kids Against Hunger by giving cash, writing a check or simply using money from their meal plans. Watch for this event on Nov. 18 and 19 from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and on Nov. 20 and 21 from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Stevens said, “I think all of these service projects are really positive for the Greeks because they encourage Greeks from different chapters to come together and work toward a common goal. I also think it is important for Gustavus to know how much the Gustavus Greeks really give back both to the local community and those around the world.”