For the past three years, a unique model of sacrifice and generosity has provided the opportunity for North Central to help send 60,000 meals to people in need around the world.
Hope for Dinner (HFD), an initiative of Venture, encourages individuals to sacrifice their regular diet for rice and beans and donate the difference to fight hunger. The university’s participation in the initiative is done in partnership with Pioneer, North Central’s food service provider.
To provide the funds for the meals, students and others who eat in the NCU cafeteria are can choose to eat rice and beans instead of the regular cafeteria options. For each student who “donates” their meal, Pioneer donates $2 to Hope for Dinner. Individual cash donations are also received during the HFD weeklong initiative.
HFD channels the donated and collected funds to ministry partners such as Feed My Starving Children.
On Dec. 5, Paul Hurckmann, executive director of Venture, came to NCU’s chapel to thank the students for the participation, noting that 60,000 meals over three years was “Incredible!” He also expressed gratitude to Greg Andrews of Pioneer Catering and the student coordinators for this year’s effort. (Watch thank you message on Facebook.)
Hurckman closed with a story of a young war widow who, upon receiving the kind of meals HFD funds recently, told a volunteer it was the first food she and her son had eaten in three days. “If a community of people gives on behalf of the poor and the oppressed,” Hurckman encouraged, “in Isaiah, [he] promises us that God’s light will shine through us and our dark nights will become like the noonday, and He will always show us where to go.”
