Throughout the semester, LNI covered Springfield and the surrounding areas with packing events at Catholic Central, Springfield High School, Peace Lutheran Church of Beavercreek, United Senior Services, First Lutheran Church of Springfield, Five Seasons Tennis Club, Lancaster Lutherans, St. Ursula Academy, Springdale Nazarene Church, Summit Academy, Global Impact STEM Academy, Twin Valley South, Enon Montessori, and on-campus packs with the men’s lacrosse team and First Year Seminar sections.
Several Wittenberg alumni also continue to remain active in the organization to help pack and serve on its board of directors.
LNI, founded by H.O. Hirt Professor of History Scott Rosenberg, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization created by a small group of Wittenberg students and faculty members.
The student-led organization provides hundred of thousands of meals a year to more than 3,000 children in Lesotho, a country of slightly more than two million people with an estimated 120,000 orphans and an estimated 35% of children under the age of five years who suffer from severe malnutrition and stunting. Only 11% of Basotho children aged six to 23 months fall into the criteria for a minimum acceptable diet.
Rosenberg, chair of the history department and director of the Peace Corps Prep Program at Wittenberg, has taken more than 500 Wittenberg students and community members on service-learning trips to Lesotho since 2003.
Participants on the trip spend four weeks in service, building houses, planting gardens, creating playgrounds, conducting education painting at schools, and volunteering at orphanages and a pediatric AIDS clinic, among other activities.
“Being involved in LNI is very meaningful to me,” Do said. “It is a simple way to really benefit people who need it. I feel very strongly that if you can help, then you should.”
LNI partners with organizations across Lesotho to combat childhood malnutrition by providing meals that contain nutritional supplements to children in Lesotho who have been diagnosed as suffering from severe/chronic malnutrition and stunting, also known as wasting.
Since its founding in 2014, LNI has raised more than $500,000, partnered with more than 30 schools, universities, churches and businesses for approximately 120 packing events and has packed more than 3.5 million meals reaching all corners of Lesotho.
If interested in volunteering for LNI, visit its Instagram account @lesothonutritioninitiative, its website at https://www.lesothonutritioninitiative.com, or contact Do or Rosenberg.
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