WOW Staff, Belmont Volunteers Team Up to Pack 427,000 Meals

By Josh Kimball, Christian Post Reporter Friday, December 19, 2008

Staff from three leading Christian music groups joined volunteers from Belmont University last week to pack nearly 427,000 meals for needy children in Thailand.

The 426,816 meals packaged at the 10-hour "WOW Shares" event will be enough to feed 1,169 children for one year, according to Belmont University, which hosted the event at its Curb Event Center Arena in Nashville.

"The 'WOW Shares' event was an incredible success," commented Laura Nielsen, offsite operations manager for Feed My Starving Children (FMSC), the non-profit hunger-relief organization that will be distributing the meals. "Not only did we pack a record-breaking amount of meals in one day, but we also helped changed the world for so many kids in Thailand."

For the Dec. 10 event, more than 1,500 volunteers worked two-hour shifts that started at 10:00 a.m. and ran through 8:00 p.m., packaging specially formulated meals in assembly-line fashion. Each FMSC meal is said to provide the key nutrients a child needs to survive and thrive.

Over the lunch break, volunteers were presented a special concert featuring Christian music artists Brandon Heath, Francesca Battistelli and Josh Wilson, who represented each of the three music groups behind the effort – Provident Music Group, Word Entertainment, and EMI Christian Music Group, respectively.

EMI CMG, Provident and Word have long collaborated in the marketing and distribution of WOW compilation projects, the series of annual compilation albums featuring the top songs today in the contemporary Christian music genre.

"WOW Shares" is a newly created effort formed by the WOW companies to mobilize Christian music industry employees to serve others this Christmas season. Funds for the meals packaged last week were provided from proceeds from the sale of WOW CDs.