PORCH Chapel Hill-Carrboro has proudly served families in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools experiencing food insecurity since 2010 through four unique hunger-relief programs:
Our flagship program, Food for Families provides more than 700 families with the opportunity to “shop” a free market bursting at the seams with fresh produce, meat, eggs, dairy, bakery and deli items, and nonperishables once a month.
PORCH addresses hunger in the classroom by providing social workers from each Chapel Hill-Carrboro City School with healthy, filling snacks to give children to help them succeed. Each year through local business sponsorships, PORCH is able to purchase $24,000 worth of snacks for this program.
Our neighbors experiencing food insecurity access resources from a number of different organizations in our community. Because of this, PORCH Chapel Hill-Carrboro is committed to supporting community-embedded food pantries so all of our neighbors can access food from institutions they trust. Each month, PORCH provides more than 1,000lbs of specialized nonperishable donations to 15 local pantries situated in our community’s faith-based institutions, schools, medical centers, and more.
PORCH Chapel Hill-Carrboro firmly believes that to solve food insecurity, we must work towards changing the systems that hold so many of our neighbors in cycles of poverty. Through Food for Thought, volunteers and program participants are given information on local resources, ways they can contact their local representatives, nutrition education, and more.
How does PORCH provide food to more than 700 families each month? That’s where the yard signs come in! Through the work of specialized volunteers called “Neighborhood Coordinators,” PORCH hosts food drives across 120+ neighborhoods each month. Coordinators communicate our greatest donation needs to their neighbors, collect food donations, then drop them off at the PORCH Community Hub. That yard sign you saw was a reminder for neighbors to put their donations on their porch for pickup (porch—get it?)
To source fresh foods for our market, PORCH utilizes monetary donations to purchase things like meat, eggs, milk, and some produce; receives free bakery and deli items through Retail Recovery; and receives 10 pallets of free, fresh produce from the Food Bank of Central and Eastern NC each month.
