Volunteers make our movement

I wanted to use Volunteers' Week this year to say something I don't think we say often enough: volunteering at Mary's Meals is not only a UK fundraising activity. Volunteering is Mary's Meals, and it always has been.

Every school day, somewhere in southern Malawi, before it is properly light, a Mary's Meals volunteer will be feeding firewood into a clay rocket stove. They will stir a vat of likuni phala, a maize and soya porridge, for a couple of hours, until it is thick enough to coat a wooden paddle.

By the time the youngest children line up with their plastic mugs, those volunteers have already been awake for hours. They are not paid. They give their time freely, often while their own children are in that queue too.

Back in the UK, in a parish hall, someone is setting out cups for a coffee morning while quietly rehearsing the five-minute talk she is about to give about the work of Mary's Meals.

Those two acts might look very different. But they are part of the same movement.

In Malawi, where Mary's Meals began in 2002, more than 80,000 volunteers prepare and serve our school meals every school day. Across the 16 countries where we work, tens of thousands more do the same. They are mums and dads, aunties, grandmothers, neighbours and former pupils.

We provide the kitchens, the food, the training and the support. The communities provide their love and labour.

Jennipher is a Mary's Meals volunteer cook at a school in Zambia. Her dedication means children can concentrate in class with full tummies, ready to learn and play.

She says: “The children no longer worry about hunger or think about going home to look for food. They find food in school.

“Even those who stopped school are coming back to rejoin classes. When their friends knock off from school, at times they carry the porridge home and those not in school admire the food – forcing them to want to be enrolled in school.

“It has been a wonderful experience.”

Our volunteers I meet in the UK aren't doing something different from Jennipher. They're doing the same thing. Our founder Magnus puts it better than I can.

A volunteer cook stirring porridge in Malawi and a volunteer running a coffee morning in the UK aren't on opposite sides of a charity transaction, they are on the same side of the same movement.

So here's what I'd love you to consider this Volunteers' Week. Could you be the person who starts a Mary’s Meals volunteer group in your community? In your village, town or city. Your church. Your school. Your workplace. Your WhatsApp group of friends. You don't need to be an expert. You don't need to give every evening. You just need to be willing to tell the story and gather a few good people around you. We'll train you, support you, send you everything you need, and put you in touch with people nearby who are already part of the movement.

If that's stirring something in you, please don't sit on it. Have a look on our volunteering webpage, or give the team a ring on 0800 698 1212. Tell us where you are and what you're thinking. And then, somewhere, a child who's still waiting for Mary's Meals gets a bit closer to a hot meal at school tomorrow morning.

Volunteers make our movement, in the UK and around the world.

Dan McNally 
Head of England & Wales, Mary's Meals UK