How Mary's Meals feeds more than 2.6 million children every schoolday with support from Atlassian cloud

Challenge: Mary’s Meals needed robust, scalable technology infrastructure so teams could keep expanding the nonprofit’s school meal programs globally.

Solution: To accommodate growth, Mary’s Meals migrated their Jira, Jira Service Management, and Confluence instances from Data Center to Cloud.

Impact: With a System of Work powered by Atlassian cloud, the team improved system scalability, performance, security, and efficiency — helping them to grow and ultimately feed 2x more children daily.

Feeding children around the world requires IT efficiency and resiliency

Mary’s Meals began by feeding 200 children in Malawi more than 20 years ago. Today, it’s an international organization that provides daily school meals for more than 2.6 million children in 16 countries. “We’re dealing with the type of hunger that disrupts daily life and stands in the way of education, but there’s a sense we can do something about it. That’s why I love working here,” says Head of Infrastructure and Operations Stephen Neil.

Mary’s Meals compromises a global network of school feeding programs across 16 countries and more than 20 fundraising entities. Mary’s Meals International is the central organization that coordinates and supports the many teams — of both staff and volunteers — leading school feeding and fundraising activities globally.

That’s a big mission, requiring robust IT infrastructure. In 2019, Mary’s Meals created a System of Work using Jira, Jira Service Management, and Confluence. This system helps connect technical and programmatic teams across Mary’s Meals so they can resolve issues faster for teams across the world.

Mary’s Meals had (and continues to have) big dreams of expanding into even more countries — which meant their infrastructure needed to scale, too. With support from the Atlassian Foundation and their solution partner, New Verve (now part of Knowmad mood Ltd), Mary’s Meals migrated from Atlassian Data Center to Cloud in November 2024, equipping the organization to keep adding programs and feeding more children for decades to come.

The next step for scalability: Atlassian cloud

Before the transition to Atlassian cloud, Mary’s Meals ran all Atlassian tools on a single Data Center node. This system was meeting the teams' needs, but was complex and time-consuming to manage. Stephen knew it wouldn’t be sustainable as Mary’s Meals grew.

Stephen suspected the many customizations were leading to speed and performance issues, and the single node left Mary’s Meals vulnerable to service interruptions or outages. The team was experiencing performance issues almost weekly, which would sometimes call for a system restart in the middle of the business day, interrupting work. As time went on, his team also found they were spending more and more time on security maintenance.

“Soon, we would have had to change our instance size on Data Center anyway. I wanted to introduce a more redundant infrastructure that could scale — and I wanted access to new Atlassian features like Rovo.”

Migrating quickly with trusted partner support

Migrating is a big change — especially for nonprofits with more limited resourcing than traditional enterprises. But as Stephen contemplated the transition, New Verve and the Atlassian Foundation stepped up to help plan a migration that would be cost-efficient and minimize disruption.

“Planning and migrating were more complicated than we could have tackled on our own,” says Stephen. “Our Solution Partner and the Atlassian Foundation gave us the peace of mind to know exactly what we were walking into.”

The Atlassian Foundation offers free nonprofit programs to support organizations in product discovery, optimization and upskilling. That includes advising and guiding teams on which model, be it Data Center or Cloud, will best support their mission, and smoothing the transition when it’s necessary. Through Atlassian Solution Grants, the Atlassian Foundation funded Mary’s Meals partnership with New Verve for end to end cloud migration.

“Atlassian Foundation has supported us for many years with Community Licenses. That’s been hugely generous and enabling,” Stephen explains.

New Verve started with a readiness assessment, in which they dove deep into Mary’s Meals needs and goals. For example, they audited the apps Mary’s Meals were using on Data Center, and chose the best apps for the organizations in cloud that could complement native Atlassian cloud functionality after the migration.

After the assessment, they spent about four weeks in testing to iron out issues. Once everything was ready, the migration itself only took one weekend. “There was no real negative impact to any of our users. End to end, the whole process took about four months,” Stephen says. “I’m incredibly grateful to Atlassian, not just for the funding for implementation, but also for the many years of supporting us through Community Licensing to date. It’s a hugely generous and enabling programme.”

Cloud infrastructure fit to feed 1M more children — and counting

With Atlassian cloud powering their team’s work, Mary’s Meals has more than doubled the number of children they’re feeding, from 1.3M to more than 2.6M every day. While scalability was the catalyst that pushed Mary’s Meals to migrate, moving to the cloud has also improved performance, efficiency, and security.

Efficiency pays dividends in saved time and heightened security

“Since the migration, we haven’t seen any of those former performance issues pop up, and our insurers haven’t reached out asking us to patch vulnerabilities,” says Stephen.

His team was able to replace most of the elements they’d custom coded in Jira with Atlassian Automation. Between nine Marketplace Apps and native cloud functionality, they’ve built a solution tailored precisely to their needs. Particularly valuable Marketplace apps include Microsoft 365 for Jira and Statuspage for Jira Service Management. So far, they’re saving at least eight hours a month on security testing and fixes, which they’re reallocating to designated “Innovation Days” every month for strategic work.

Faster responses in multiple languages with AI and Rovo

Unlocking access to Rovo and AI-powered features is proving to be another valuable addition for Mary’s Meals. “We’re just beginning to find uses for AI, but our teams are already relying on capabilities that aren’t available in Data Center,” Stephen says.

For example:

• In Jira, Rovo lightens the load of work planning by suggesting content for projects, tasks and subtasks, so teams can get to execution faster.

• In Jira Service Management, teams spend less time handling repetitive queries with Rovo’s AI-suggested responses.

• In Jira Service Management, AI translations make it easier for IT teams and service agents to communicate with affiliates in other countries.

In the future, Stephen hopes Rovo can help affiliates self-serve by sharing knowledge from Confluence without the user needing to open a ticket. Mary’s Meals is also considering Atlassian Goals as a potential means to collaborate with affiliates on strategic initiatives and track progress toward objectives and key results.

Atlassian cloud has made teams’ jobs easier – and better teamwork means making life better for the children Mary’s Meals serves. “My greatest accomplishment in this role is helping build the infrastructure we’ve used to double how many children we feed,” Stephen says. “I’m confident now that we’re on Atlassian cloud, we can do that again and again.”