14.05.2020.
What is Mary's Meals?
Mary’s Meals works with local communities in 19 countries to provide life-changing school meals in places where poverty and hunger prevent children from gaining an education.
It’s a simple idea that works! The promise of a nutritious meal encourages hungry children – who might otherwise have to work, scavenge or beg for food – to come to school and gain a basic education, which can help free them from poverty. Our school feeding programmes are consistent and reliable, meaning that children can have access to nutritious meals throughout the school year. This directly supports the target of SDG2 to “end hunger and ensure access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round.”
Mary’s Meals is owned and run by local communities and where possible, meals are prepared using food that has been grown locally. This helps to support families and boost the local economy. More than 1.6 million children now eat Mary’s Meals in schools, nurseries, and education centers around the world.
While schools are closed globally because of Covid-19, Mary’s Meals continues to work with local communities to deliver food and hygiene supplies, so families can cook nutritious meals for their children at home – their temporary place of education – and help protect themselves against the virus.
Research shows that, at schools where Mary’s Meals are served, children:
“Our vision for Mary’s Meals is that every child should be able to receive at least one good meal every day in a place of education and that all those who have more than they need, share with those who lack even the most basic of things.”
“We are giving vulnerable children a meal while they learn, so that any hope of a better future is nourished and kept alive.”
“It’s not about the big numbers. It’s about the next child waiting for Mary’s Meals.” said the founder Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow.
Veronica’s story:
Veronica was one of the first children to receive Mary’s Meals at school in Malawi in 2002. She went on to become the first girl in her family to go to secondary school, and then the first to graduate from university!
“My parents died when I was young. I would go to sleep without supper. Eating Mary’s Meals at school helped me concentrate and education gave me the confidence to succeed. Please keep helping Mary’s Meals so that other children can have a better life and fulfil their dreams, like I did.”
This is the history of Mary's Meals:
During the Bosnian war in the early 1990s, our founder Magnus McFarlane-Barrow and his brother Fergus were moved to help those suffering. They appealed to friends and neighbours for donations of food, clothing, blankets and medicine.
The brothers took a week’s holiday, loaded a secondhand Land Rover with supplies and joined an aid convoy heading for a refugee settlement near the town of Medjugorje in Bosnia. Magnus never returned to his old job and what was meant to be a one-off delivery of aid, grew into the international charity that became Mary’s Meals.
In 2002, while delivering aid to Malawi during a famine, Magnus met Emma, a widowed mother of six who was dying from AIDS. When Magnus asked her eldest son Edward what his dreams were in life, he replied simply: “I would like to have enough food to eat and I would like to be able to go to school one day.”
These words continue to inspire our work and the old shed where Magnus stored those first donations of aid remains our global head office to this day.
Follow them and donate so they can keep changing lives:
www.marysmeals.org
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