As Sandra Shenk volunteered at the Mennonite Relief Center in Hinton, Va., during its annual chicken canning project in late February, she recalled the verses that were part of her Sunday school class earlier that week.

The lesson at Bethany Mennonite Church, a Southeast Mennonite Conference congregation in the Shenandoah Valley, was on Matthew 25, including verse 35 (NIV), which reads: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.”

“It was very fresh on my mind,” she said, sitting at a dining table during a break on a Thursday morning. “It was very clear to me as we taught it. That is what brings me here.”

Shenk, 34, who has been helping at the event since she was 16, was not the only volunteer to preserve meat that Mennonite Central Committee will send to people in need around the world. From April 2024 through March 2025, MCC sent 611,520 cans to eight countries, including the U.S.

Various Mennonite groups, families and individuals helped with filling cans with chicken to be cooked, labeling the cans after they were sealed and packaging them in boxes. Among the volunteers were Old Order Mennonites.

Clair Good, the Plain Community liaison for MCC, who relates to Amish, Old Order Mennonites and other Plain groups, was on hand in Virginia for several days.

“It is always fun to see the amount of energy that has gone into collecting the money — seldom talked about — and the diligent work of putting the meat together,” he said. “Literally it is [almost] all volunteers. They will buy meat, buy the cans. It is no small feat. Some places can 55,000 pounds in a week.”

Another volunteer was Tim Frie­sen, whose connection to canning goes back to his youth in Henderson, Neb. Years later, from 2003 to 2005, he was part of MCC’s volunteer canning crew that drives the mobile cannery to each site within the U.S. and Canada. The crew is responsible for cooking the meat the volunteers prepare.

Friesen moved with his family to Virginia in 2018 and this year brought his son Noah, 9, with him to volunteer after school one day.

“People want to know how to make a difference,” said Friesen, a member of Immanuel Mennonite Church in Harrisonburg. “The canning brings people together in ways they may not [usually] be together. It is the kingdom of God because there is one common mission goal.”

The 2025-26 canning season began in Sterling, Ohio, in October and ends in Manheim, Pa., in May. MCC’s canning and trucking manager George Eckman estimates the crew and volunteers will have produced almost 600,000 cans, or 898,000 pounds, of meat when the season concludes.