Mary's Meals
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| Founded | 1992 (SIR) 2002 (Mary's Meals) |
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| Focus | School Feeding |
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Area served
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Developing World |
| Slogan | A simple solution to world hunger |
| Mission | To give every child one school meal a day |
| Website | www.marysmeals.org |
Mary's Meals is a registered charity, formerly known as Scottish International Relief (SIR), which sets up school feeding programmes in some of the world's poorest communities, where hunger and poverty prevent children from gaining an education. It was founded in 2002 and has grown from its first feeding operation of 200 children in Malawi, to a worldwide campaign, providing free school meals in hundreds of schools and feeding more than one million children daily. Mary’s Meals is named after Mary, mother of Jesus, by its founders, who were inspired by their Catholic faith, although the charity is not a Catholic organisation.
SIR began in 1992 during the Balkan conflict, when Magnus and Fergus MacFarlane-Barrow organised a local appeal for blankets and food. They filled a Jeep with aid and delivered their cargo to Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The brothers, aged 25 and 27, returned to Scotland expecting to resume work as fish farmers, but in their absence their parents’ shed had been filled with yet more donations.
Magnus took a ‘gap year’, to deliver the aid for as long as it was needed, and has never gone back to his old job. The donations didn’t stop – they still haven’t – so the project was registered as a charity, then named as Scottish International Relief.
During a trip to Malawi in 2002, Magnus met a family whose predicament was to spark a change in not only his own life, but in the lives of thousands of others.
Lying on the floor of a hut was a mother named Emma, who was dying of AIDS. Her six children were gathered around her and Magnus asked the eldest son, Edward, what it was that he hoped for in life. “To have enough to eat and to go to school one day,” was his answer.
Edward’s words inspired a mission to attract girls and boys to school by providing Mary’s Meals. One step at a time, through Mary’s Meals, Magnus has let children all over the world know they matter.
From feeding just 200 children in southern Malawi in 2002, the charity now works with communities in 12 different countries around the world, proving a meal for 1,187,104 children every school day.
Mary’s Meals is a simple idea that works. A daily meal in school has a positive impact on enrolment, attendance and performance in class, and could even hold the key to eradicating child hunger altogether. The global average cost of feeding a child for a whole school year with Mary’s Meals is just £13.90/€15.60/$19.50.
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Wikipedia