Westmont Magazine Helping the Hungry

Dave Phillips ’84 and his wife, Lynn, founded Children’s Hunger Fund in 1991 to help churches reach low-income families with the gospel by distributing food and aiding children in orphanages, homes for the handicapped, and pediatric hospitals worldwide.

Unlike most food banks, which distribute canned and packaged goods, Children’s Hunger Fund taps into the store of surplus crops across the southwestern states that would otherwise rot in the fields. Semi-tractor-trailer trucks, whose services are donated, pick up the goods Dave and his four employees locate by phone and deliver them to a warehouse in Pacoima, California. From there, volunteers from 60 churches in the San Fernando Valley pick up the food and deliver it to the needy.

In 1996 alone, Children’s Hunger Fund distributed food and personal hygiene items to 55,000 children from 12,000 low-income families in the Valley. In addition, they gave 168,000 new toys and gifts to children from southern California to New York, Romania and Albania to Russia and the Ukraine.

Even more exciting, some 6,000 individuals made first-time decisions for Christ in their southern California food distribution program and more than 4,000 youths and adults in a prison campus in Siberia heard the gospel for the first time. Hundreds of these prisoners committed their lives to Christ, astonishing Russian security personnel who witnessed their changed lives.