Meet Food for Schools Sponsor FurnitureLab 

Carrboro-based FurnitureLab is a contract furniture manufacturer, meaning the team makes furniture for commercial spaces where people gather to dine, collaborate, and relax. Their furniture is often found in college dining halls, hospital cafeterias, food courts, and corporate break rooms. If you see colorful graphics on a tabletop, it’s probably a FurnitureLab piece! 

They are also proud sponsors of our Food for Schools program. 

FFS provides supplemental food to students in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools who are hungry and struggling to concentrate in the classroom. Through FFS, PORCH Chapel Hill-Carrboro provides each school with $1,000 worth of snacks in a school year – $500 at the beginning of the school year and $500 after the holidays. The snacks – cheese crackers, granola bars, applesauce, apples, protein bars, trail mix, fruit bars, and more – are purchased in bulk, brought to a central location, and sorted. Then, school social workers pick up the healthy snacks on a designated day each semester. To learn more, check out our recent feature on this program. 

“We are a small, family-owned business, so our corporate giving is often aligned with our personal concerns,” says co-owner Bryna Rapp. “We have always wanted to strengthen our community by making sure kids’ needs are met. We support a number of local non-profits working to fight hunger and provide fresh food to families as well as several that provide arts education to kids.” 

FurnitureLab also sponsors The ArtsCenter and Meals on Wheels, and its employees collect non-perishable goods for TABLE each year. The business has an ongoing relationship with Feeding America. Before the pandemic, whenever the company hosted a webinar presentation for designers and dealers, the leadership team would buy lunch for the group. With so many people working from home, they started sending the money that would have gone toward lunch to Feeding America instead. FurnitureLab is on track to send more than $10,000 to Feeding America this year.

“We are fortunate to live in a community where there are so many non-profits helping to keep the most vulnerable in our community safe and supported,” Bryna says. “It is a monumental task, and I feel like the least we can do as small business owners is support these efforts financially.” 

View our full list of FFS sponsors and learn more about becoming a sponsor.