February 2022: The Latest from PORCH

• Meet Chapel Hill FedEx worker Darnell. We are so grateful to him! He shifted his schedule around to make sure that we received snacks for our Food for Schools program in a timely manner. Had he not offered to do this, the packages wouldn’t have arrived by our designated pick-up day, and we would have needed volunteers to transport many boxes of food to 20 Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools!
  Food for Schools provides supplemental food to kids in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools who are hungry and struggling to concentrate in the classroom. PORCH Chapel Hill-Carrboro provides each school with $1,000 worth of snacks per a school year. Learn more about Food for Schools here.

• February is synonymous with love, and we are looking for 28 monthly sustainers to sign up over the course of the next 28 days – an act of love for the families in our community grappling with food insecurity. Get set up to automatically give $5 each month, $10 each month, $20 each month, or more.
  Every dollar makes a meaningful difference in our work to provide hundreds of Chapel Hill and Carrboro families with fresh and non-perishable food. Over 10.8% of adults and 12.2% of children in Orange County are food insecure, meaning that they lack sufficient food for an active, healthy life. An overwhelming majority of participants in our Food for Families Program say they sometimes, often, or always worry about having enough food to feed their families, and 71 report less income due to the pandemic.
  We provided about $800,000 in hunger relief in 2021. But we need your help in order to continue this work. Go to our donate page – and click on “recurring donation” to become a PORCH sustainer. Thank you for strengthening the safety net for our most vulnerable community members!

• The always incredible Chapel Hill High School PORCH Club helped us sort snacks for our Food for Schools program last month. Thank you to Abby, Emily, and Mia for your hard work! Be sure to read this new feature story on our Food for Schools program – read what school social workers have to say about it!

• Sharing the love! The Chapel Hill High PORCH Club made cards this month to distribute to our families for Valentine’s Day. 

• Tammy LeMoine from Starfish Bakery is helping us shower February’s volunteers with love, gratitude, and sweet treats – just in time for Valentine’s Day! Thank you!

• Jade Sterling and Logan Harris from UNC’s Alpha Phi Omega Service Fraternity dropped off two carloads of food donated by UNC students! These kind and generous young people give us so much hope for the future. 

• We are proud to partner with Pre-K/Head Start to help get the word out about their open enrollment for their pre-K programs for 3- and 4-year-olds for the upcoming school year. We provided these flyers to our families this month in all appropriate languages. 

• East Chapel Hill High School’s PORCH Club held a food drive this month, collecting a carload full of food for us! Pictured here is Neha Madhavapeddi. We appreciate the support! 

• This month, we successfully distributed food to 493 families (2,065 individuals!) in our fresh Food for Families program. Families received 40 pounds of fresh produce, eggs, milk, chickens, bags of nonperishable food or 25-pound bags of rice, and $75 grocery gift cards. PORCH Chapel Hill-Carrboro has now offered $4.5 million in hunger relief support to our community since we launched in 2010! 
  We received these words of appreciation from program participants when we asked what PORCH means to their family: 
  “It means ‘love your neighbor.’ I truly am profoundly grateful to you and everyone that donates so that this food arrives in our homes. We can eat more healthily and the gift cards help my family so much. Thank you.”    
  “For us, it is very important because the pandemic affected our entire family, and not only that, we are going through a very difficult situation affecting work for the entire family. I want to thank you for the food and for the entire team that makes PORCH possible.”   
  A few highlights: 
• This month, we partnered with the Town of Chapel Hill and the NC Department of Health to distribute KN95 and N95 masks to all of our families.
• The Chapel Hill High and Carrboro High PORCH Clubs created beautiful Valentine’s cards for our families! 
• Many of our families have challenges getting to our distribution site each month because they do not have transportation or have an emergency. Thanks to Amy, Jenny, Julie, Sophia, Mark, Tammy, Debbie, and Doug for delivering to 24 families this month!
• We partnered with OWASA to again distribute information about the Low-Income Household Water Assistance Program, helping families with their water expenses. 
  Thank you to all of the donors, volunteers, and partners who contributed this month! We are so grateful for our village!