Mary’s Meals feed millions of kids

Mary’s Meals is a Scottish charity that sets up school food programs in some of the world’s poorest communities to ensure that hunger and poverty do not prevent children from gaining an education.

Since its beginning in 2002, Mary’s Meals has grown from feeding 200 children in Malawi to a worldwide campaign that now feeds more than 1 million children daily.

Mary’s Meals is named after Our Lady. The charity’s inspiration is Catholic, although the charity is not officially a Catholic organization.

Just before Christmas 2019, the charity’s founder, Magnus MacFarlane, spoke to the Register about why he started Mary’s Meals and how his Catholic faith helped not just its founding but also how it guides its continuing mission:

"I never set out to “start Mary’s Meals." I just tried to do one very small thing to help, and then a chain of events, which is still unfolding, began to happen.

There were certainly very specific experiences and encounters along the way, though: Our first pilgrimage to Medjugorje when I was only 15 years old led my parents to convert our home into Craig Lodge House of Prayer. It was 10 years later that my brother and I launched an appeal and drove some donated aid to a refugee camp. Without that earlier decision by my parents, this new work would not have begun to grow, not least because of the large network of people who had been on retreat at Craig Lodge over the years and who began spontaneously to support and fundraise for our mission. That outpouring of support led me to give up my job as a salmon farmer, and I began driving truckloads of aid to the former Yugoslavia.

In 2002, Mary’s Meals was born in Malawi. That was a year of terrible hunger there, many millions facing starvation. We got involved in setting up emergency feeding projects through Catholic missionary priests and nuns. The resulting new campaign began to provide daily meals in places of education for children — the poorest children on Earth who miss school because of hunger.

Mary’s Meals is a universal mission. People of many different faiths and no faith participate around the world. The only qualification required is a love of the hungry child. But for me, personally, and for a huge proportion of my co-workers, faith is at the heart of what motivates us and shapes our mission.

Adapted from an article by K.V. Turley NCRegister