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April is Global Volunteer Month: Join Us As We Celebrate The Impact YOU Make Possible!

  • Amanda Whitmyer

on  April 1, 2025

As a volunteer with Rise Against Hunger, your support strengthens communities and creates sustainable solutions for long-term food security, empowering volunteers in the countries we serve around the world. In honor of Global Volunteer Month, we are celebrating YOU and the remarkable difference you continue to make. Keep reading to learn more about Global Volunteer Month and how you can take action today to end hunger! 

The Purpose of Global Volunteer Month

Held every April, Global Volunteer Month is an initiative created by Points of Light, a global nonprofit organization dedicated to volunteer service. This month-long celebration encourages and recognizes volunteerism, sharing the positive impact of volunteers who actively give back to their communities and the world through service. 

At Rise Against Hunger, our community of Hunger Champions is vital to our mission. Whether you volunteer locally at one of our warehouse locations, provide your skills to further our mission or team up with your group or local community at a meal packaging event, you help children and their families facing hunger receive nutrition, education and hope for a nourished tomorrow.

 

How Volunteer-Packaged Meals Nourish Lives (and Volunteers!) Worldwide

Your commitment as a volunteer strengthens communities and empowers many other volunteers worldwide, like Josephine in the Philippines. As a devoted mother and volunteer cook at Bungkol Elementary School, she prepares nutritious Rise Against Hunger meals packaged by volunteers like you for students up to twice a day through the school’s feeding program.

With two children attending the school, Josephine’s children also receive weekly take-home rations, furthering the impact of the volunteer-packaged meals. She shares, “My hope for my two children, and to all the students here, is that they graduate from their studies, reach their dreams, so that when they get there, they can succeed more.” 


Ways You Can Get Involved This Global Volunteer Month

During Global Volunteer Month this April, there are many ways to volunteer in person or virtually and help grow the movement to end hunger. Join us in making a lasting, sustainable impact in one (or all) of the three ways below! 

  • Host a meal packaging event: Help people facing hunger worldwide by volunteering with your business, church, organization, school or other group to package nourishing Rise Against Hunger meals. The meals you package are provided through school and community feeding programs.
  • Become a Social Media Ambassador: Engage your social media following to spread the word as an advocate for hunger relief. Once you sign up, you’ll receive a social media kit to share our mission and encourage others to volunteer. Be sure to tag our social profiles in your posts with #GlobalVolunteerMonth and #ItStartsWithAMeal.
  • Donate to further the mission: Your gift helps sustain our impact, ensuring children, families and communities have access to nutrition and the resources they need to thrive. Together, we can make every month a volunteer month — it starts with a meal®, and it starts with you!

Interested in learning more?
Our team is ready to help!

To find out more about meal packaging and how to organize your own event, fill out the form and a Rise Against Hunger team member will contact you to start planning. If you’ve connected with our team or filled out this form previously, no need to submit it again. A Rise Against Hunger team member will be in touch soon!
 

Perfect for all kinds of organizations:

  • Corporations
  • Civic & Service Clubs
  • Communities of Faith
  • Colleges & Universities

About the Author

Amanda Whitmyer served as the Digital Marketing Specialist at Rise Against Hunger.

Strength, Stability And Hope

The gift that filled Nelly’s table.

“We were yielding very little, and the crops could not sustain us the whole year,” Nelly remembers. As a mother of seven and a farmer with two decades of experience, the stress of inconsistent yields was all-consuming. A poor harvest not only strained her family financially, but also limited their own meals to just two a day. Their story reflects that of many in their fishing and farming village near a lake in the Karonga district of northern Malawi. Here, heavy rainfall makes conventional farming methods nearly impossible. The entire village is, quite literally, saturated in food insecurity — a reality that leaves families struggling to survive season after season without a dependable source of nourishment.

In 2019, Nelly began participating in Harvesting Prosperity and Resilience, a sustainable agriculture project implemented by Rise Against Hunger in partnership with the Foundation for Community Support Services (FOCUS). The project works with 3,100 smallholder farmers in Malawi’s Karonga and Mzimba districts to strengthen food and nutrition security by improving production methods, nutrition practices and household income.

Just one year later, Nelly was ready to expand the variety of crops on her farm. What land once only produced maize began to flourish with sesame, cowpeas, rice and groundnuts during the rainy season (summer), as well as maize and vegetables during the dry season (winter). Through climate-smart agriculture training, she learned new techniques like manure making, pit planting and mulching, crop rotation and intercropping. Equipped with these tools, Nelly’s farm began to thrive.

After the 2023–2024 growing season, she sold enough produce to purchase an ox cart. Her harvests in 2024-2025 season yielded over 500 pounds of crops, including 22 bags of groundnuts, seven bags of maize, 12 tins of sesame and three bags of rice. With this surplus, she was able to invest in a motorbike, which she now uses to transport African doughnuts (mandasi) that she cooks and sells — creating yet another source of income for her family.

The transformation reaches far beyond her finances. Nelly now has the stability to provide for her husband and children. “I am able to eat different food types, pay school fees for my children and fulfill the visions that I have made with my family,” she beams. “I am now sleeping peacefully without any fears of food or paying school fees for the children.”

Her leadership has also grown. Today, Nelly serves as a leader in the Harvesting Prosperity and Resilience project, teaching other farmers in her district to adopt climate-resilient, labor-saving practices. By sharing her knowledge, she is multiplying her impact — empowering her neighbors to experience the same transformation she has achieved.

Across Nelly’s community, food and economic security are on the rise. Lombani, a government extension officer for the region, explains, “I can see the community is being transformed in the sense that in the area, there is food, income and nutrition security. Development is also happening at the household level.”

Nelly reflects on what it means to invest in holistic programs that address the root causes of hunger: “We are now healthy people. Children are going to school after eating their breakfast, having high yields and different types of crops due to conservation agriculture practices. With the support from the project, we have food, and we can access other food items from the market after selling our produce.”

This is the gift that fills: a future full of stability, strength and hope. It fills tables with food, families with security and communities with the resources to thrive. It’s an investment in futures rooted in resilience and hope.