Packaging 50,000 meals in an hour and a half is a lofty goal, yet that’s just what Whitefish High School’s STAND club accomplished, and with time to spare.

But it took enlisting the entire student body to do so.

On Tuesday, about 450 students and 50 staff members formed assembly lines at 40 rows of tables set up in the gym to pack meals of rice, fortified soy, dried vegetables and a vitamin/mineral powder.

In just 50 minutes, 540 boxes containing the individually packaged meals were ready to ship to refugee camps in countries such as Haiti and Jordan by Kids Against Hunger and be distributed locally to Flathead Food Bank, Sparrow’s Nest of Northwest Montana and North Valley Food Bank.

“We were packaging about 1,000 meals a minute,” Whitefish senior Bergen Carloss said. “We couldn’t do that unless the whole student body was actively participating.”

A significantly smaller group took roughly three hours to set up the operation.

“We were really nervous,” Carloss said about the process going smoothly with an effort of this magnitude. “But it went as well as it could have gone. We cranked it out.”

Carloss and Whitefish senior Cassidy Grady are members of the Whitefish High School chapter of STAND, a national organization led by students to end genocide and other global atrocities, according to www.standnow.org. Ten members make up the group.

“The people who do it are the most motivated group of individuals I’ve met,” Carloss said.

“We just wanted to do something that was going to help a lot of hungry people, involve the entire school, help the community and the world at large. We got hooked up with Kids Against Hunger that does things like this in other places and they were really helpful,” she said.

Grady helped spearhead fundraising and social media efforts along with helping map out the layout of assembly lines. They raised more than $6,000 through fundraisers, donations from local churches and organizations such as the local Rotary and Soroptimist International of Whitefish and online at www.gofundme.com, plus Kids Against Hunger and the Orphan Grain Train contributed $10,000 to the project.

“I think the most challenging part was just getting started with the fundraising because we weren’t really sure we would get enough money for this,” Grady said.

Hilary Matheson is a reporter for The Daily Inter Lake. She may be reached at 758-4431 or hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.