Feeding 2.4 million schoolchildren every day with Our Lady as his 'boss'

As he’s sitting in a shed at a salmon farm in Argyll, a remote part of Scotland, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow’s life is only seemingly calm. He quit his farming career in 1992 and threw himself into the charity business. This led him to fund Mary’s Meals in 2002.

The name of the charity for the Scottish Catholic was as obvious as it was providential.

But his first charity baby was Scottish International Relief. Driven by an impulse of the heart during the Balkan conflict in 1992, he and his brother Fergus loaded a jeep with aid and joined a convoy traveling to Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, to distribute it. As a “mountain of donations” flooded in — he drove there 23 times to deliver supplies.

“This shed was full to the roof of food and clothing and people kept on giving, and so I had this choice to make — and it was a surprise to me,” he told OSV News.

Realizing “this is going to be a lot harder to stop than it had been to start,” his first charity was born.

“I decided to give up my job. I sold my house. Somebody gave me a truck and I said to God, ‘I’ll keep doing this as long as there’s a need and as long as people keep giving’ and that’s kind of the promise I made. But I made it thinking, ‘I’ll probably do this for a few months. I might do it for a year.'”

Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, founder of Mary’s Meals, is seen in a 2024 photograph in Ethiopia. The charity started in 2002 with meal distribution to 200 children in two primary schools in Malawi. Today, Mary’s Meals serves meals to 2,429,182 children every school day across 17 countries. (OSV News photo/Armstrong Kiprotich, courtesy Mary’s Meals)

Thirty years later, he’s still moving forward. But what defined his most important project was when in 2002 he landed in Malawi during the famine that killed several hundred Malawians.

There he met a mother dying from AIDS. When MacFarlane-Barrow asked her eldest son, Edward, what his dreams were in life, the boy replied simply: “I want to have enough food to eat and to be able to go to school one day.”

The spark was lit when MacFarlane-Barrow realized “they miss school because of begging or working. They miss education — their one ladder out of poverty. So that really made me start thinking about this possible intervention.”

Mary’s Meals was born right after that — starting with meal distribution to 200 children in two primary schools in Malawi. Today, Mary’s Meals serves meals to 2,429,182 children every school day across 17 countries.

The charity is named in honor of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who brought up her own child in poverty.

The name goes back to an earlier trip by MacFarlane-Barrow to Medjugorje, earlier than the one during the Balkan war in 1992.

In 1983, 15-year-old Magnus was on a trip there with his parents and sister Ruth. The pilgrimage inspired them to turn their house on a farm to a retreat center. They published an article about their transformative experience in the leading British Catholic media — Catholic Herald — and an avalanche of letters of readers from across the globe followed.

One of them was from a woman pilot named Gay Russell, who was living in Malawi. Out of hundreds of letters they received, she became a symbol for 15-year-old Magnus that the Catholic media article had an impact on very unexpected strangers. His mother even wrote a letter back to Russell, but the contact with Russell was cut.

When MacFarlane-Barrow arrived in Malawi 20 years later, in 2002, he was telling someone the story from his childhood when a stranger, an Englishman, approached.

MacFarlane-Barrow recalled the conversation.

“I overheard you talking,” the man told him. “I know Gay Russell. I’m building a church in Malawi with her at the moment — a replica of the Medjugorje sanctuary. And I can reconnect you.”

MacFarlane-Barrow credits Mary for connecting two complete strangers from two different corners of the world under one umbrella — to help those in need.

“Gay Russell got involved in lots of famine relief work. She was the perfect person to introduce us to people to begin working there,” MacFarlane-Barrow said of the first Mary’s Meals local project in Malawi.

The stranger who connected the two was Tony Smith. When — to the surprise of both — they were sitting at the dinner table at Russell’s house that same night, Smith told MacFarlane-Barrow he was watching a speech by U.S. Sen. George McGovern, who played an instrumental role in creation of the U.N. World Food Program.

“McGovern was really saying that if America decided to provide one meal every day for every child in the developing world, it would act like this Marshall Plan that would lift the world’s poorest nations out of poverty,” MacFarlane-Barrow recalled Smith saying.

“And Tony said when he heard these words, he got this inspiration that if someone took that concept and gave it to our Blessed Mother and called it Mary’s Meals, it would actually happen.”

MacFarlane-Barrow did not think twice about making it happen and offered his immediate “yes.”

Children smile eating their school meal at Ambohimiarina Primary School in Madagascar in this 2022 photograph. The meals are provided by Mary’s Meals, charity started in 2002 with meal distribution to 200 children in two primary schools in Malawi. (OSV News photo/courtesy Mary’s Meals)

“When he shared that with me, it was like everything that had happened in my life from 1983 through to having that conversation with Edward at his mother’s deathbed the week before — it all came together in that moment,” he said, adding that “this work belongs to our Blessed Mother.”

One of the organization’s core values is “our confidence in the innate goodness of people. And it’s not just nice sounding words. That’s what made these meals a product of a fruit of the goodness of people,” MacFarlane-Barrow told OSV News.

In Malawi, where Mary’s Meals started, there are over 50,000 Malawian volunteers “giving up their time to cook and serve the food. They’re nearly all people who live in poverty themselves, and yet they’re choosing to give that gift that they can give of their time,” the founder said of an army of Mary’s Meals volunteers spread across the globe.

Mary’s Meals is not only serving warm porridge to kids waiting in the school line with their plastic cups to get what is often the only meal of their day. The organization supports their parents, too, by buying the food locally.

“We build a store and a kitchen at the school,” MacFarlane-Barrow said. “But then it’s very much a responsibility of the local community to organize the volunteers, to cook and serve those meals every day, so that’s a core part of this model, that local ownership thing and that real clarity around rules and responsibility.”

Rasody is one of the volunteers in Andasidraivony Primary School in Madagascar. He has four children who are studying there. Parent volunteers are divided into different groups, so they take turns cooking.

“We are very happy that our school is able to benefit from this school feeding program. It is a very big motivation for our children to go to school every day and I hope that it will increase the school’s success rate,” Rasody said.

“Due to this school feeding program, our children will be stronger,” he added.

There are many ways to get involved, MacFarlane-Barrow told OSV News. “First of all, I would describe Mary’s Meals as a fruit of prayer, so I would invite people to pray for this work,” he said. He added that to feed a child for an entire year costs $25.

This GivingTuesday, Mary’s Meals USA is tripling every donation: “For every dollar you give, a generous donor will provide two dollars, making your gift 3x as valuable,” the organization said on its website, www.marysmealsusa.org.

Why does it matter to feed schoolchildren? Because when they’re hungry, they can’t focus at school.

“The data we collect, we can see that school enrollment goes up dramatically,” when children are fed at school and “academic performance improves,” he told OSV News.

One of the first children to participate in Mary’s Meals programs was Veronica from Malawi. Today she’s teaching at college after she graduated with a degree in education, MacFarlane-Barrow told OSV News, highlighting her story with pride.

Another Malawian girl, Letti, was 12 when she was orphaned and had to take care of her two younger brothers. Today Letti is working with Mary’s Meals, empowering another generation of children.

Asked what it feels like for the program to have grown so much, from a couple hundred to nearly 2.5 million meals a day, MacFarlane-Barrow, husband of Julie and father of seven, said that on one hand, “it’s amazing. It’s wonderful. It’s something I have this enormous sense of gratitude for to see this thing grow.” But on the other hand, he said that while “we live in a world of plenty that produces more than enough food for all of us,” there are “67,000,000 children” who are not in school because they are hungry.

He said that a full answer to the question is “always with that other feeling of there’s so much more to do. And why aren’t we making that happen more quickly?”

“That vision that every child in the world should eat every day a meal in school, that’s entirely possible,” MacFarlane-Barrow told OSV News. “You know, it’s a scandal that’s not already happening.”

He said people ask him: “‘Magnus, how do you sleep at night when those two and a half million children depend on the meals?’ And you know I sleep very well at night, because it doesn’t feel ever that this is mine, you know? Or that it depends on me as an individual.”

He said Mary’s Meals is “this amazing sign of God’s providence, sign of God’s love for the poorest in our world,” recalling many miracles that have happened throughout 22 years of Mary’s Meals operations.

He admitted that if God had asked him right away in 1992 to run a multinational charity, “I would have run away and hidden, you know?”

But God acted through baby steps: “He asked me to do one little thing. I said ‘yes,’ and then he asked me to do another little thing, and I said ‘yes,'” said MacFarlane-Barrow, now 56.

That “yes” led him to receive a CNN Hero title in 2010. He’s been honored with the Order of the British Empire and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.

“When a story starts like this, ‘Two brothers walk into a bar,’ it usually doesn’t end well,” Scottish actor Gerard Butler said of MacFarlane Barrow’s first Balkan mission when he introduced him at the CNN Hero Gala. “But this story is different,” he said.

When Butler joined MacFarlane-Barrow in Liberia in 2020, they met a child named Sunday Boy.

“I want to become a senator, a representative or a president,” he told Butler.

And that’s precisely how Mary’s Meals empowers kids, its founder told OSV News. All thanks to a woman whose name it bears, he added.

“I very much feel like Our Lady’s my boss, you know? And that she’s looking after me.”

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