KNOXVILLE — About 6,000 high school students from across North America will get a hands-on lesson about world hunger this week at the CHIC 2006 conference being held on the University of Tennessee campus.

CHIC 2006, a high school youth conference of the Evangelical Covenant Church, is teaming up with Feed My Starving Children (FMSC) from July 17-21 so students can gain an understanding of world hunger. The group will pack meals for some of the world’s most malnourished children.

FMSC, based in Brooklyn Park, Minn., is a nonprofit Christian organization which uses volunteers to pack meals made of rice, soy, vitamins, chicken flavoring and dehydrated vegetables in a formula designed particularly for severely malnourished children.

FMSC has a mobile packaging unit that will visit CHIC 2006. The goal is for 1,800 of the conference participants to work together in two-hour shifts to package a total of 500,000 meals which will be sent to Africa. Each meal package — consisting of fortified rice and soy protein — costs only 15 cents to produce.

The packing will take place every afternoon of the week in the Thompson-Boling Arena beginning today.

On July 18, CHIC participants will attend a program at 9 a.m. to learn more about how hunger is addressed by FMSC as a small group of teens fill the mobile packaging unit on the arena floor. From 12:30-2:30 p.m. that day, CHIC participants will forgo their regular conference meal to sample the food products that FMSC sends around the world.

ARAMARK, UT’s provider of dining services, is providing $10,000 to FMSC for the meal.
Partnering with Covenant World Relief, CHIC is trying to help Bentiu, a small village in central Sudan. In addition to packing meals, which will be used to start a food program there, CHIC participants will donate money to help build a new school, buy school supplies, pay teachers’ salaries and build a medical clinic for the community.

For more information on the CHIC 2006 conference or the Evangelical Covenant Church, visit www.covchurch.org or for more information on FMSC, visit www.fmsc.org.

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Contacts:

Amy Blakely, (865) 974-5034, amy.blakely@tennessee.edu
Robert Gibbs, (865) 974-0250, rgibbs@utk.edu
Darrin Devault, (865) 974-0270, devaultd@outreach.utk.edu

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For more UT news, visit http://www.tennessee.edu/news/tntoday/

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