By Brenda Camp, Community Relations
Thank you for Rounding Up in 2019! Shoppers rounded up 756,495 times for $330,560—an average of 47 cents a round up. And we passed $1 million in donations for our Community Food Partners. Thanks to you, we’ve added two Meals on Wheels organizations who serve Orange County.
2019 Round Up in Review
In 2019, we served a record number of food insecure neighbors, mostly kids, in neighborhoods throughout Orange County. In September, our round up program grew to include our sixth partner in our Community Food Partnership, and our first in Wake County—A Place at the Table, a pay-what-you-can community cafe. The café provides healthy breakfast and lunches for all regardless of ability to pay. Individuals who cannot pay for a meal receive a free meal token in exchange for an hour of volunteer work at the restaurant.
The addition of our Raleigh Round Up helped us reach the $1 million mark for our Community Food Partnership, which started in 2015. In 2017, we changed our donation program to the Round Up to make participation more accessible to anyone who wanted to donate their change.
In 2019, more than 38% of our 1.97 million shopping transactions were rounded up to the nearest dollar. As our 2019 results show, the power of our Round Up campaign is that as a large community we can individually make many, many small donations that quickly add up to a substantial collective amount:
Exciting Changes for 2020’s Round Up
Exciting changes are lined up for this year’s Round Up campaigns. Our customer service staff set the goal of achieving a 40% Round Up rate— that is, 40% of all shopping transactions rounded up to the nearest dollar. With just a 2% increase in participation, we can grow our impact in two important ways:
1. Start a fresh fruit program for two Meals on Wheels organizations that serve the food-insecure seniors in Orange County.
Our fresh fruit for seniors will benefit Meals on Wheels at Orange Congregations in Mission, which provides hot lunches 5 days a week for 50 to 60 seniors in Hillsborough and surrounding communities, and Chapel Hill-Carrboro Meals on Wheels (CH-CB MOW), which provides hot meals 5 days a week for 260 to 270 seniors. This spring, Orange County Rural Alliance (OCRA) will merge with CH-CB MOW, which will allow CH-CB MOW to extend their services to rural areas that are challenging to cover.
One in five seniors in North Carolina is food insecure. This includes those who do not know where their next meal is coming from and those who do not have access to healthy food options. Seniors living in rural communities are at even greater risk.
2. Support our existing community partners as they grow their programs while continuing to meet the needs of the families and kids they’ve added through our Round Up.
This year we’re setting campaign goals for each Round Up campaign to help our food partners budget for the support they can provide their clients. When we reach the goal for one client, we’ll roll into the next campaign.