By Brenda Camp, Community Outreach
Since May 1, Weaver Street owners and shoppers have rounded up their purchases 394,493 times to raise $171,495 dollars to provide fresh healthy food for 1,027 food insecure kids in Orange County.
Our summer Round Up benefits children served by two of our community food partners who are committed to eliminating childhood hunger: TABLE in Chapel Hill-Carrboro and Orange County Schools (OCS) in Hillsborough.
Because of your Round Ups at our Carrboro and Southern Village stores, TABLE is piloting its first backpack program at an OCS school—New Hope Elementary. Your Round Ups at the Hillsborough store enables OCS to grow its reach to 500 kids, as well as add milk, eggs, cheese, and butter to the boxes of produce and non-perishables provided to the families.
100% Goes to Food
A lot of work and planning goes behind this promise! Here’s a glimpse of what happens:
- Year round, our merchandising staff work with the organizations to determine the food needs for the kids and families they serve.
- Then, our merchandisers negotiate with our vendors and farmers to source the food at or below cost, drawing up both our buying power and our long-time relationships.
- Our merchandising staff and warehouse staff handle the logistics of receiving, sorting, storing, and delivering the food to the organizations or directly to the schools.
- We make deliveries to the food pantries every Tuesday, to the two PORCH organizations once a month, to TABLE every week in the summer and every other week during the school year, and to the OCS three times a year.
The Round Up program in so many ways, exemplifies what we mean when we say we are “A Market for the Community, by the Community.” Thank you, all who participate in making this program an astounding success!