Meet Food for Schools Sponsor Kitchen and Bath Galleries

Kitchen & Bath Galleries is a full-service kitchen and bath showroom in Glen Lennox, offering design, product, and installation – a one-stop shop for appliances, cabinetry, countertops, and plumbing fixtures.  

Since 2017, they have been a proud sponsor of PORCH’s Food for Schools (FFS) program. 

FFS provides supplemental food to students in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools who are hungry and struggling to concentrate. Through FFS, PORCH Chapel Hill-Carrboro provides each school with $1,100 worth of snacks in a school year – $550 at the beginning of the academic year and $550 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.   

Once the social workers divide the snacks among grade levels within their school, students simply let their teacher know when they are hungry and would like a snack to tide them over during the school day. Each school nurse gets a supply of snacks, too – a vital resource when students aren’t feeling well and need some sustenance.   

To learn more,  check out our recent feature on this program.  

Kitchen & Bath Galleries is led by Nick Vaughn, its managing partner. 

Nick has five children who are enrolled in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools. All of them have gone through Frank Porter Graham Elementary’s Spanish immersion program, which has allowed him to witness a socioeconomic diversity that enriches the whole community. 

“It gets lost in Chapel Hill – we have world-class health care and innovation,” Nick says. “It’s easy to think that everyone is rich and good to go. You don’t have to spend a lot of time outside to realize – that’s just not true. … When little kids are involved, what can we do to make sure that everybody has that safety net and can learn and grow and become the best version of themselves?” 

Nick adds that Chapel Hill is a place bursting with civic pride, but it’s hard for that pride to co-exist with the harsh reality that children are facing food insecurity every day. “Let’s not talk about what we can’t do; let’s talk about what we can do,” he says. “Let’s make sure these kids have snacks – we can check that box.” 

Nick’s Kitchen & Bath Galleries team consists of 13 people. He says that the housing crisis of 2008-2010 helped to realign their priorities. They started thinking about ways to conduct business that went beyond the bottom line and focused on opportunities to enhance the community. They launched a program that designated a certain percentage of sales each month to a cause, such as cancer research, autism research, or food security. 

“You don’t operate in a vacuum,” Nick says. “You operate in a real community that has hungry kids.” 

Kitchen & Bath Galleries has been an avid supporter of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro YMCA over the years, as well as TABLE. They are also working on green initiatives to offset their carbon footprint. The team loves hearing from their clients about the local non-profits that matter to them. “It’s really cool when you have a meaningful client say, ‘Hey, here’s something that means a lot to our family. Could you help out with this?’” Nick says. “Everybody is coming at all of this from a very different place. Not everyone is equally resourced.”

Learn more at kandbgalleries.com. 

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