Volunteer group completes Shropshire Three Peaks Challenge
Mary’s Meals Shropshire saw 90 walkers and runners take on their second Shropshire Three Peaks Challenge to celebrate our 3 million milestone
On Sunday, 7 September, 90 local walkers and runners completed their second Shropshire Three Peaks Challenge, raising vital funds for Mary’s Meals. The event coincided with our exciting milestone: we are now serving nutritious school meals to 3 million children every school day!
The Shropshire Three Peaks Challenge was a tough 10 mile route with 2,450 ft of elevation, taking on Hope Bowdler, Caer Caradoc and the Lawley.
Alison Staples, part of the volunteer team says:
Our first Three Peaks Challenge last year was such a great success that we wanted to do it again this year! The event is a wonderful way to get people out into the Shropshire Hills and raise money to help others at the same time. We are delighted that this year our event coincides with such an incredible milestone for the charity.
Volunteers like Alison play a vital role in helping Mary’s Meals to feed children in the world’s poorest communities, and reaching this new figure of 3 million children.
Our story began in 2002 when our Founder, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, visited Malawi during a famine and met a mother dying from AIDS. When Magnus asked her eldest son Edward what his dreams were in life, he replied simply: “I want to have enough food to eat and to go to school one day.”
Today, 23 years later, we serve more than 3 million school meals a day across 16 countries, including Haiti, South Sudan and Syria. The milestone follows a major scale-up of our school feeding programmes across nine countries, with around 800,000 children added to the programme globally since the start of 2024, including in Ethiopia’s war-torn region of Tigray, Malawi and Zambia, which are enduring the effects of climate change-induced drought and flooding, and Haiti, a country besieged by political unrest and extreme violence.
Magnus, who still works out of the same tin shed in Dalmally which serves as our global headquarters, says: “When we first began serving Mary’s Meals in one small primary school in Malawi back in 2003 we could never have imagined that this would grow into a global movement now serving more than 3 million children every school day.
And yet, at the same time, when we see how this simple, inexpensive intervention is helping to transform some of the world’s poorest communities we have an urgent desire for it to grow faster – and a belief that it can.
Each ticket for the Shropshire Three Peaks Challenge raised enough to feed a child with Mary’s Meals for an entire school year. Thank you once again to everyone who took part and made this incredible impact possible!
