I’m Grateful For the Process

Hey friends!

As I sit here typing this, I am all but ready to dash out of my apartment in my college town and head home for Thanksgiving. Just kidding. There’s still about a week more until I can officially head home, but my mind is so incredibly focused on thankfulness and how grateful I am (and yes, the Thanksgiving turkey, haha!) that I can hardly contain it.

That being said, I wanted to share a bit about why I’m filled with so much gratitude right now…and to finally tell you about my secret project that I was working on a while back in Chicago.

A few weeks ago, I was asked by the Kraft Heinz Company Foundation to come to Chicago, one of my most favorite cities in the world, for an exciting collaboration to go behind the scenes at the Kraft Heinz Company Foundation. When I learned about the Foundation’s efforts to eliminate world hunger and malnutrition, it was such an easy choice to jump on board!

I was invited to spend a day helping pack meals that would get sent around the world. The Kraft Heinz Company Foundation wanted to create a momentum of giving back within their company, so they host meal packing events like these to spread the word about their mission of ending hunger throughout all realms of the company.

It was so wonderful to see the KHCF do something so different than simply just writing a check. As a group, hundreds of employees signed up to work different shifts during the day, in order to package the meals that would then get shipped all over the world.

In these bags, a small (but mighty) packet of micronutrients is included. This is sprinkled on the food that’s included in the package in order to combat malnutrition. These packets were filled with all the healthy essentials that are so important for us to intake, but so often aren’t included in the types of meals that those living in poverty eat regularly.

Throughout the entire process of packaging meals alongside so many other people, the staggering statistics of how many millions of people are living around the world in hunger really sunk in. Being part of such a movement, I realized that the things I saw firsthand while living in Guatemala could now be helped. When I spent the summer living in Guatemala before I started college, I saw people whose entire meal planning process depended on how much they made selling their wares in the market that day.

There were plenty of people in Guatemala who wouldn’t be able to afford meals after a slow day at work, and that has always stuck with me and deeply impacted me by witnessing that. This campaign really touched me because I was given a tangible way to help people around the world, combatting hunger and malnutrition.

I couldn’t be more grateful for this experience as well as to be introduced to some of the sweetest and most genuine ladies EVER. The opportunity to share this experience with several other college ladies who blog was something that I don’t take for granted. It was so awesome to get to be included in this time of helping others and see Chicago all at once with some women whom I now get to call some of the most inspiring girl bosses I know.

Now I want to hear from you. What are you grateful for this fall? I want to challenge you to take that overwhelming amount of gratitude and do something special for someone else this season. There’s not really much that beats the feeling of helping others, and I want to start a momentum of doing good and giving back. Let’s get in the spirit of Thanksgiving, friends!

Much love,

Olivia

Kraft Heinz paid for my trip to Chicago for the meal packaging event and I couldn’t be more grateful for this opportunity.