On Friday February 12, the St. Peter and Gustavus Community gathered together to help end hunger locally in Minnesota. Gustavus sorority, Zeta Chi Phi, partnered with the South West Minnesota Serving in God’s World Board and the local community to help package meals that were distributed all over Minnesota.
Matthew Martin, a Gustavus alum and uncle of Zeta Chi Phi member, Mattilan Martin, started the Outreach Program, which hosted a contest on what organization could raise the most money in a specific amount of time. Martin started the program because during his time here at Gustavus, he was homeless. His experiences with homelessness and hunger helped him start the Outreach Program.
The contest the Outreach Program started was whoever raised the most money would then receive around $23,000 towards the food and supplies to be packaged and donated.
Zeta Chi Phi saw the opportunity to approach their philanthropy differently this year and it proved the most successful thus far as they won the contest and received the donation from the Outreach Program that went towards their supplies and food, which helped them pack over 90,000 meals that were distributed to 10 different counties in Southwest Minnesota.
“Spread Your Love Food Pack” event was the Zeta’s largest and most successful event for their sorority this year.
“We started planning in October because there was a lot of logistical aspects that needed to be taken care of like how we were going to advertise it, what the company outreach was actually about, how much food and volunteers we’d need etc. Since there were so many elements that went into the planning, as Zetas, we took all of our time to plan this,”Sophomore Zeta Chi Phi member, Kacie Baltes said.
Since the event takes so much time and volunteers, Zeta Chi Phi plans to put it on every other year. In order to recruit volunteers, they advertised on campus, throughout the St. Peter community, talked to churches and businesses and were even able to do a Mankato broadcast.
“I think the event was very successful for our first run because we were able to package about 82,000 meals,” Senior Zeta Chi Phi member, Mikaela Warner said.
As distribution manager of the event, Blates needed to calculate how many hungry people were in each county based on poverty percentage and population in order to determine where the food went.
“It was crazy to me to see the numbers throughout all the counties; some counties only had 400 people and some counties had upwards of 20,000 people who went hungry. Personally, it was really eye opening to see how many people needed this event and we ended up raising enough money to provide a meal to every single person who went hungry in Southwest Minnesota,” Baltes said.
The day of the event, the Zetas hard work paid off as they witnessed a line of volunteers out the door who wanted to all help them pack the meals. People from all over the St. Peter and Mankato community came out. The Greek community was also very supportive with most members from each chapter participating. Tau Mu Tau Sorority was almost in full attendance supporting the Zeta Chi Phi chapter.
“I think as a whole our sorority really enjoyed our time packing food and also supporting Greek life. The atmosphere of the event was really uplifting and we competed with surrounding table to see who could pack the fastest. It’s amazing to see how many boxes we packed when everyone devoted an hour or so of their Friday to help out”, Junior and President of the Tau Mu Tau Sorority, Julia Rudberg said.
The Zeta Chi Phi members put a lot of hard work and a lot of their time into putting the “Spread the Love Food Pack” event together and they are amazed by the positive feedback and are hoping to continue it.
“It’s just amazing to see how appreciative people were. They were saying ‘thank you so much for putting this together,’ people were really looking forward and excited for it,” Warner said.
The Zeta Chi Phi sorortiy would like to thank everyone involved and who helped them make the “Spread the Love Food Pack” event such a success.