Iowa Stops Hunger Podcast: Meals from the heartland ups number of meals shared in Iowa

by lisa rossi

As fall nears, Meals from the Heartland, which works with volunteers to package meals that reach children and families across the U.S. and the world, is preparing for its busy season, including its annual Hunger Fight.

Leaders of the Des Moines-based nonprofit have a goal of packing 1.75 million meals during the event, which occurs Oct. 6-10. 

“We need 3,800 … of our friends to come in and help us pack,” said Chuck Current, executive director of Meals from the Heartland. “We clear out our warehouse and we do it all here on campus and to have a room filled with a couple hundred people all doing the same thing and you hear people coaching each other and you hear … tables competing because they’re with the same company or sometimes there are competing companies next to each other. It’s a great opportunity for people to bring in their families, their work, schools.”

Current recently spoke on the Iowa Stops Hunger Podcast about the nonprofit’s efforts to bring food to Iowa and the world. Here are six takeaways from the conversation.

Meals from the Heartland started as a project with Lutheran Church of Hope.

The church wanted to pack 1 million meals and “blew through that goal,” Current said.

“A group of leaders with the church and some community leaders felt that there was a constant need, and in 2008, we became our own 501(c)(3) organization and started the path that we’re on today,” Current said. “Since 2008, all the way through today, we’ve shared, packed, and shared over 280 million meals here in Iowa, around the United States and all around the world.

Volunteers are a core part of the work.

“In 2025, we had about 62,000 volunteer opportunities, where people came in and packed – that’s individuals, churches, organizations, businesses, civic groups, all kinds of people,” Current said. “We do what we call open packs, but it’s nine packing shifts a week that are totally open to the public with no cost. We need people to come in. In September we start getting busy again. Summer is usually a little slower. We anticipate that we’ll probably have almost 75,000 volunteers this year.”

Meals from the Heartland is ‘revolutionizing’ its volunteer experience.

“Historically, we packed a six-serving bag,” Current said. “We are moving to an eight-serving bag, and what that allows us to do is in that same two-hour shift, our volunteers only need to be on the floor for 90 minutes and still do the same number of meals that can be shared, but then that extra time is an opportunity for us to educate and engage volunteers and share exactly where the meals are going and hear firsthand from some of our staff that has gone to some of these locations and seen the impact that these meals from Iowa make throughout this state and throughout the world.”

More meals are being shared in Iowa.

“Ten percent of all the meals that we pack and share are going to Iowa,” Current said. “So to give you an idea, just over 2 million meals were shared in Iowa last year, which was double the number of meals shared in 2024, and that was created by a number of different situations. We had some delays in government assistance with the SNAP benefits, but we’ve also done a better job of reaching out to many of our partners and making visits to the food banks around the state of Iowa, and how we can be a better partner and how we can help them plan.”

A lot of people who volunteer at Meals from the Heartland use the volunteer-time-off programs at their companies, Current said. 

“We instituted a similar program for our employees here, and the only stipulation is that volunteer time has to be at a pantry that we serve, and the reason for that is then they’re there when our neighbors are going throughout that pantry and they can hear the comments around our food and how it’s displayed and should we have different recipes available, and all those kind of things,” Current said. “We’re really trying to be … better stewards to our volunteers and to our partners in meeting the need of Iowans.”

Food is a building block in building relationships and trust with local communities.

Some Meals from the Heartland employees, along with Current, went to El Salvador to work with their international distributor and partner, Convoy of Hope.

“Some of our employees had an opportunity actually to serve the food, and interact with the people,” Current said. 

Convoy of Hope builds trust through food, Current said. 

“For instance, they will only provide 80% of the food that is needed in that market because they want the local community to be responsible for 20%,” Current said. “Right away, there’s accountability and buy-in from those local communities to make this work, and I think that’s absolutely an outstanding method that has worked very well for them. … We’re not just sending food over and over and over again to the same places, and it never seems to improve. We’re sending food to places that have programs that will be able to sustain themselves without long-term food, because that benefits everybody.” 

Meals from the Heartland is working to collaborate more with the community.

Current said the Healthy Kids Iowa program Iowa ran last summer after opting out of the federal Summer EBT initiative, created a “huge lift for the food banks” that Meals from the Heartland was able to help address. 

“We were in a meeting with Food Bank of Iowa, and Tami [Nielsen] was lamenting on the fact of ‘Oh, we [have] to rent trucks and we’re going to have to hire people.’ We said, ‘Well, hey in the summer, we’re not as busy; we have trucks.’ … And so we volunteered to do that and to give you an idea, we moved 146,000 pounds of food last summer for the Food Bank of Iowa to help address this food insecurity, and we’re always looking for more opportunities that we can do that in the community.”