We’re moving to a year-long series of Round Up! campaigns for our community food partnerships. We’re asking you, our community of owners, shoppers, and staff, to donate your change by rounding up your total purchases to the nearest dollar. The power of our Round Up! campaigns is that as a large community we can individually make many, many small donations that quickly add up to a substantial collective amount.
When we hosted our first Round Up! last December, for produce for IFC’s and OCIM’s food pantries, our community said “yes” to rounding up 82,500 times for $43,500 in five weeks. With the funds donated, we purchase and deliver a pallet of fresh vegetables and fruit to the food pantries every Tuesday.
The year-long Round Up! will continue to support our partners—TABLE, PORCH, IFC, and OCIM—as well as a new partner we’ll announce soon. If we come together as a community to support the Round Up! campaigns, as we have the other food campaigns, the impact on hunger will be truly phenomenal. Here’s how that could look:
- With our TABLE backpack and PORCH bag of produce campaigns (five two-week campaigns), the community made 18,632 donations for an amazing total of $224,640! That’s an average donation of $12—an amount that’s a little too much for some budgets.
- With our December Round Up! campaign, the average donation was 53 cents. That’s an easy “yes” for most of us many times, perhaps all the time. We also appreciate that sometimes you may say “no.”
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“That’s why the Round Up! is so genius. It takes the donating power out of the hands of a few into the hands of the many. This is truly community-funded hunger relief. Mutual aid y’all!”
—Tizzy Giordano, Carrboro front-end staff and campaign coordinator
With over 1.87 million transactions a year in our three stores, the potential Round Up! proceeds approach $1 million. With that level of funding, we as a community can ensure that there is abundant food for those amongst us who are most vulnerable to hunger—the children of low-income families, the increasing senior population, the growing number of rural families living below poverty, and our African American and Latino families who are disproportionately affected by unemployment and poverty.
Your round ups this summer support TABLE’s Summer Backpack program, which provides backpack meals for kids who do not have access to free or reduced meals when school’s out for the summer. Our goal is to provide healthy food for 450 kids for the 10 weeks of summer break. To achieve this, we need to raise $67,500—that’s $750 a day in Round Up! transactions.
Another way to look at it is this: On any day, we only need 1,500 of us to say, “Yes—today is one of my round up days.” In the first week, 16,250 Weaver Street shoppers have donated $8634.22, which will provide backpack meals for 57.5 kids this summer. We’re already moving steadily toward the goal, one round up at a time.