Inside the plan to pack a million meals for food pantries in 24 hours of All-Star Weekend

The IBJ Podcast

This is the week of the NBA All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis, which officially tips off on Thursday and will run through the 73rd NBA All-Star Game on Sunday night. Over the next week, Indianapolis will be the site of star-studded concerts, exhibition games, fan-friendly activities, multimedia programming and major art installations. For this week’s episode of the podcast, we wanted to focus on a philanthropic feat that deserves to be in someone’s record book. The Indianapolis-based not-for-profit Million Meal Movement is bringing together thousands of volunteers in Lucas Oil Stadium on Thursday in an attempt to pack 1 million meals for Indiana-based food pantries in a 24-hour period.

For a not-for-profit with such an aspirational name, Million Meal Movement is a surprisingly compact organization. It has five employees, including co-founder Nancy Hintz, who is a full-time executive for another firm in the food and agriculture space. But since Hintz and her husband, Dan, founded the group in 2007, it has packed nearly 35 million meals for food-insecure people. Nancy Hintz is our guest this week, sharing the story of how she and her husband met at Indiana University, the game plan for packing one million meals in one day, and the group’s strategy for simplifying its operations so its impact can have such a wide footprint.

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