An estimated one of every eight Americans – about 12 percent – are considered "hungry," meaning they don’t know where their next meal is coming from.

It’s an encouraging statistic, considering not many years ago the ratio was 1 in 6, or around 17 percent, Deirdre Schmidt, a member of the Greater Nashua CROP Hunger Walk leadership team, told her fellow volunteer walkers on Sunday.

But while "we have made a difference, there is still a lot of work to be done," Schmidt said, shortly before members of her audience departed Temple Beth Abraham in song and hit the road for Sunday’s 32nd annual walk.

The total number of walkers and the funds they collectively raised this year are still being computed, but last year’s walk drew about 450 participants who together raised in excess of $40,000.

The Greater Nashua walk surpassed the $1 million mark three years ago, and organizers and walkers immediately set their sights on the $2 million milestone.

Nashua’s, a project of the Nashua Area Interfaith Council, is one of about 2,500 CROP walks held each year across the nation, including 21 in New Hampshire. Others nearby include the Souhegan Valley walk, held in May in Milford, and the Manchester/Londonderry walk, which was hosted last week by St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Londonderry.

Nearly two dozen organizations, 12 of them churches and synagogues, make up Nashua’s Interfaith Council, which was founded as the Nashua Council of Churches roughly 50 years ago.

Among its other member groups are Rivier University, the B’hai community, and the Granite State Organizing Project.

CROP walks are rooted in a post-World War II anti-hunger initiative undertaken by a newly-formed organization called Church World Service, which sought to work with Midwest farm families to share their crops with citizens of war-torn countries in Asia and Europe.

Called the Christian Rural Overseas Program, the initiative began going by its acronym when the first CROP Hunger Walks took place in 1969.

In Nashua, meanwhile, the CROP walk has grown to include a pre-walk interfaith service and a brief speaking program, as well as a post-walk barbecue featuring live music by the Raymond Street Klezmer Band, along with the New Fellowship Baptist Church Gospel Choir and the Interfaith Community Choir.

Under the CROP walk format, 75 percent of funds raised are donated to Church World Service’s global anti-hunger programs, with the remaining 25 percent going to local food pantries.

This year’s beneficiaries are the Nashua Soup Kitchen & Shelter, the Nashua Salvation Army, the Nashua Pastoral Care Center and the St. John Neumann Church food pantry in Merrimack.

Schmidt, a member of Nashua’s Christ the King Lutheran Church who is on the CROP walk’s leadership team, introduced a new wrinkle to this year’s event – a game based on Twitter.

In a nod to technology, participants join the game by buying a "Twitter feeding packet," adopt a Twitter hashtag and be identified as a player by a cardboard "footprint" cutout they wear around their necks.

The game, Schmidt said, is just one more way to enhance the CROP walk’s core purpose: Ending hunger through networking and meeting new people.

"That’s the name of the game. That’s what we’re here for today," she said.

Dean Shalhoup can be reached at 594-6443, dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com or@Telegraph_DeanS.