Westwood Resident spearheads “Feed Haiti Packathon”

Michael Gillis, a Westwood resident, has once again spearheaded a massive effort to raise money and provide food for the underprivileged in Haiti.

Working together with Feed the Hunger to provide support through the Crudem Foundation, Gillis organized a three-day “Feed Haiti Packathon” at the Knights of Columbus in Needham. Gillis and his family have made many trips to Haiti to provide relief and care for residents over the last 15 years. Food supply became a major issue during the COVID-19 pandemic because the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti was closed.

Feed The Hunger provides the logistical support necessary to transport the many pallets of food by boat to Haiti.

“For the past 15 years, I’ve been working with the Justice and Peace Committee here at St. Joseph’s and I’m the liasion with Crudem,” said Gillis. “I’ve been probably about seven times to Sacre Couer Hospital in Haiti. We built a neo-natal intensive care unit. We built a new medical library, a dental clinic. Then we went to building houses, went to sponsoring kids in school. After that, because of the food insufficiency and insecurity last year with the border of the Dominican Republic being closed, we decided to try something new and had no idea how to do it.

“We found this group ‘Feed The Hunger,’ they came in, we got people. Before you know it we had over 200 volunteers. We packed 92,000 meals here, 30,000 meals at St. Sebastien’s and 20,000 meals at Montrose.”

“All of these meals are going to Haiti,” said Marty Helton of Feed The Hunger. “However, we serve in 20 different countries around the world – Haiti, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. We have 250,000 meals that are going to be arriving any day in Poland for the Ukraine.”

Saturday and Sunday in Needham, volunteers apportioned close to 153,000 dry meals that were individually vacuum sealed and packed in boxes, organized to be sent to Haiti and scheduled to arrive in six-eight weeks.

You can learn more about Crudem by visiting the foundation’s official website at crudem.org

FEED HAITI PACKATHON PREPARES MORE THAN 150,000 MEALS FOR THOSE IN NEED