Minnesota Couple, Wedding Guests Pack Meals For Starving Children

COON RAPIDS, MN — Instead of showering Minnesota newlyweds Adam Claude and Chara Juneau with rice after their New Year’s Eve nuptials, the guests put on plastic hair nets and packed it in meals that will feed dozens of starving children in Sierra Leone for a year. The Twin Cities couple decided to hold their wedding at the Feed My Starving Children headquarters in Coon Rapids, where they met in 2017 while packing meals for the international Christian charity.

Claude, 37, and Juneau, 35, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune they’re minimalists and wanted a wedding that would reflect their shared values. It didn’t make sense for them to spend a lot of money on a wedding — something Juneau is very familiar with as a wedding photographer.

They had considered a courthouse wedding until Judy Watke, the development director at Feed My Starving Children, suggested the couple get married at the place where their love blossomed. They’ve spent Valentine’s Days together packing meals, and Claude even proposed to Juneau at Feed My Starving Children.

“We wanted the day to mean something,” Juneau told the Star Tribune of the wedding at Feed My Starving Children, founded in 1987 to provide nutritionally complete meals that are specifically formulated to meet the needs of malnourished children like those in Sierra Leone. The pre-packaged meals of rice, soy, dried vegetables and vitamins are sent to more than 70 countries.

“Everyone does something that’s special to them or special to their family,” Juneau told television station KSMP. “People have traditions and I wanted ours to be us and be unique to us and that this is something we love and something we care about. We have had a lot of date nights here. It’s part of our relationship, so it just felt perfect to have it be exactly that.”

Claude, who owns an IT consulting firm, said the more he and Juneau kicked around the idea of getting married at the group’s Coon Rapids headquarters, the more logical Watke’s off-handed suggestion became.

“We thought, ‘Why don’t we do something different?’ ” Claude told the Star Tribune. “We would rather go to Feed My Starving Children and use it as an opportunity to pack meals. We’d rather raise money for kids and use this as an opportunity to serve.”

Their friends and family loved the idea.

The 22,000 meals they packed will feed 60 children in Sierra Leone for a year. Nearly half of all child deaths in the West Africa nation are due to malnutrition, and nearly one-third of children under 5 are chronically malnourished.

The couple’s only regret is they hadn’t invited more people so more meals could have been assembled, they told KSMP.

The newlyweds added a few twinkling lights and some tulle to give the room where meals are packaged a more festive appearance, but Juneau told she Star Tribune she wanted the place to “still feel like Feed My Starving Children.”

“The whole thing cost very little money,” Claude told Yahoo Lifestyle. “I didn’t want to start our lives in debt. It was a great way to generate money — rather than spending thousands of dollars, we could raise thousands of dollars.”

For their honeymoon, the couple will travel to the Virgin Islands. Claude submitted the winning bid for the trip at Feed My Starving Children’s annual gala and auction. The trip is for January, so they had to move their wedding ahead to make everything coincide.

The couple want to raise $1 million for starving children and have set up a page on Feed My Starving Children to accept donations. More than $115,000 had been raised Wednesday evening. A single meal costs only 22 cents, Claude said.

Photo: Minnesota-based Feed My Starving Children packages and sends meals of rice, soy, dried vegetables and vitamins to 70 countries. A Twin Cities couple who volunteer for the Christian nonprofit based in Coon Rapids held their wedding there, and guests packaged enough meals to feed 60 children in Sierra Leone for a year. (AP Photo/Jim Mone: File)