Area college students help in Stop Hunger effort

More than 100 students from four area colleges combined their manpower to take a bite out of world hunger Saturday.

Students from Lynchburg College, Randolph College, Central Virginia Community College and Sweet Briar College teamed up with Raleigh, N.C.-based Stop Hunger Now and Lynchburg-based Sacred River Productions at a benefit event at Amazement Square’s Rotary Centennial Riverfront Skatepark.

Over a few hours out of the eight-hour event, volunteers bagged 20,000 basic meals of soy protein, dehydrated vegetables, rice and a chicken tablet, to be distributed by Stop Hunger Now.

For a $20 or $25 admission, residents could hear music from local bands and watch local skaters showcase their skills.

Lenny Craig, of Sacred River Productions, said his group was responsible for booking the music for the event.

He said he felt the musical aspect was “the most effective efficient method of marketing, especially to a younger generation.”

Craig said he felt the role he was trying to play and promote was nothing other than “to go out and be do-gooders.”

“This is the funnest thing I think I’ve ever done in Lynchburg,” he said.

Ray Buchanan, who founded Stop Hunger Now in 1998, said Saturday’s event was similar, though on a much smaller scale, to events he had organized in North Carolina.

Buchanan, who lives in Raleigh, said the group has organized all-day drives that incorporate students from Duke University, the University of North Carolina, East Carolina University, North Carolina Central University and Saint Augustine’s College, among other institutions statewide.

Those events may result in as many as 1 million meals packaged in a day, Buchanan said.

“It’s not about packaging meals,” he said, though he didn’t detract from the importance of that aspect.

“It’s about starting a movement,” he said.

For Buchanan, world hunger is a travesty along the lines of slavery in America or conditions before civil rights, both of which were accepted as normal before their respective revolutions.

“The only way we’re going to end hunger is to get everybody so outraged that there’s hunger in the world that they take action,” Buchanan said.

Carolyn Walsh, one of nearly 50 volunteers, by her estimate, from Lynchburg College, said she had helped at a similar event in Lynchburg last year.

“I think it’s a really great cause,” she said, adding, “I love how you can send (the meals) anywhere, and it can be used immediately or saved for emergencies.”

Walsh estimated that after the first round of packaging, she had helped put together about 1,500 meals.

Rosana Fernandez, a sophomore at CVCC, said she got involved through her position as the Student Government Association president.

Though she said she appreciates the emphasis on feeding children internationally, her passion lies closer to home.

“We should do something more involved within the United States because we also have a lot of poverty,” she said, emphasizing the poverty present even in Lynchburg and its surrounding counties.

“I think we’re kind of ignoring that,” she said.

Buchanan said in the four years since his group has organized events like Saturday’s, they have employed about 50,000 volunteers and packaged about 18 million meals.

“That’s a small drop in the bucket, but it shows that you can make a difference,” he said, adding, “All I want to do is change the world.”