Engaging in local activities is one way GreenStone gives back to places where we work and live. Our employees carry out our passion for community engagement through a variety of activities both as GreenStone representatives and as volunteers – we are pleased to tell their stories here. Watch for upcoming stories of how our employees give back in our Open Fields blog!
Take a moment and think back to the days of laughing and making memories with your friends in the school cafeteria over lunch period. It seemed the only care in the world was making sure you finished dessert by the time the bell rang for the next class to begin. Think about if when the lunch bell rang on Friday afternoon, you knew you may have eaten your last real meal until Monday when school resumed. This is a very real concern for too many children in our community.
One of the groups trying to combat this issue for local children is the Northwest Initiative; a non-profit organization in the Lansing area working to strengthen and sustain healthy communities through community engagement and mobilization. Through their continuing efforts, this organization is working to chip away at the food insecurity issue one weekend survival kit at a time.
Members of GreenStone’s East Lansing Crop Insurance team including Lorialyn Sabin, Jerilyn O’Leary, Izzy Ybema, Gordon Waltz and Ben Mahlich volunteered at a weekend survival kit packing event on April 11. The system ran assembly line-style, where volunteers packed several take-home meals into each kit for children with food insecurity at home. They even provide simple recipes for them using the food included in the kits.
Lorialyn said, “Altogether, we packed enough kits to provide weekend food security to over 940 Lansing children! The kits enable those children to focus on finishing schoolwork, playing and forming friendships, or extending the volunteer impact even more and helping out others that are also in need instead of worrying about empty bellies. We were so grateful to be a part of the event!”
The children volunteering also understood the importance of what they were doing for their peers, saying that some of their friends were receiving the kits.
This program provides children in the community experiencing food insecurity a chance at just being a kid, instead of worrying where their next real meal would come from. The program is invaluable, as children are the future and their health and well-being should come first.
Learn more about the Northwest Initiative at http://nwlansing.org/?.
