Spotlight on Charities

TABLE delivers healthy food and nutrition education to children in Orange County, North Carolina. They envision a community where all children have equitable access to nutritious food and knowledge in order to experience optimal health, well-being, and dignity. Through their hunger relief and nutrition education programs, their goals are to:

Improve children’s overall health

Increase children’s knowledge of nutrition, positive attitudes toward healthy eating, and/or long-term healthy eating habits

Ensure kids and families are engaged, involved, and feel dignified

Ensure kids have access to and eat sufficient nutritious food

www.tablenc.org

Loaves & Fishes/Friendship Trays provides groceries, meals and hope through a network of food pantries and as the primary Meals on Wheels program for Mecklenburg County.

Last year, Loaves & Fishes/Friendship Trays provided groceries and meals to 80,000 people. Half were children and seniors.

Loaves & Fishes/Friendship Trays is the merger of two longstanding hunger fighters:

Loaves & Fishes – providing a week’s worth of nutritionally balanced groceries to individuals and families experiencing a short-term crisis through a network of emergency food pantries located throughout Mecklenburg County.

Friendship Trays – delivering nutritious meals to elderly or infirm individuals who are unable to obtain or prepare their own meals while also providing human connection to the isolated and lonely and peace of mind to their families.

Now stronger together in fighting hunger, Loaves & Fishes/Friendship Trays strives to be the one answer to our community’s food insecurity needs by providing nutritious groceries and prepared meals. We believe that working together as one will improve overall access to healthy food in a way that ensures kindness, dignity and hope are byproducts of our services.

Loaves & Fishes/Friendship Trays administrative offices and warehouse are located in Fordham Park at 648 Griffith Road, Suite B Charlotte, NC 28217.

Working together to end hunger

Feeding America is the largest hunger-relief organization in the United States.

Our mission is to advance change in America by ensuring equitable access to nutritious food for all in partnership with food banks, policymakers, supporters, and the communities we serve

In a country that wastes billions of pounds of food each year, it’s almost shocking that anyone in America goes hungry.

Yet every day, millions of our neighbors don’t get the food they need to live healthy lives.

We work to get nourishing food – from farmers, manufacturers, and retailers – to our neighbors while addressing the root causes of hunger.

Facts about hunger in America

• According to the USDA, more than 34 million people, including 9 million children, in the United States are food insecure
• The pandemic has increased food insecurity among families with children and communities of color, who already faced hunger at much higher rates before the pandemic.
• Every community the country is home to families who face hunger. But rural communities are especially hard hit by hunger.
• Many households that experience food insecurity do not qualify for federal nutrition programs and visit their local food banks and other food programs for extra support.
• Hunger in African American, Latino, and  Native American communities is higher because of systemic racial injustice. To achieve a hunger-free America, we must address the root causes of hunger and structural and systemic inequities.

As a large regional food bank, we provide food for all who need it with a concentrated focus on our most vulnerable populations—children, working families, college students and seniors.

We purchase nutritious food and shelf-stable items—and grow a portion of our own produce—for distribution through our Partner Network, which provides food at more than 300 locations throughout Orange County. This vital network includes houses of worship, school and college pantries, afterschool programs, Permanent School Pantries, senior centers, transitional housing facilities, soup kitchens and shelters for the unhoused.

We welcome donations of food and funds from our generous donors. We also work with like-minded organizations to address the root causes of hunger, like poverty and missed educational and vocational opportunities. Together we can make life better for our entire OC community.

A hundred years ago, McDowell County, WV was one of the wealthiest zip codes in the nation. Now many folks there don’t have running water, or their tap water is too dangerous to drink.

 The reasons are complicated: 100-year-old water pipes failing, contamination from local mines, the collapse of the coal industry. It’s a complex issue that DigDeep is partnering with local staff and the water utility to improve.

 So this year, DigDeep will bring clean, running water to 150 families in 2023—some for the first time ever—and we’ll do it from within the local community. Residents will guide the work; our local staff will serve their neighbors; and we’ll work in partnership with local governments and water utilities, with capacity-building in mindWe’re extending new, high-pressure water lines to reach households deep within mountain hollers. When our work is finished, families will have working sinks and toilets at last.