A new organization has formed to collect more food for the hungry in the community.
People Offering Relief for Chapel Hill-Carrboro Homes, or PORCH, incorporated in May to organize monthly neighborhood food drives to restock the shelves of the pantries at the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service, St. Joseph CME Church and TABLE.
Chapel Hill residents Christine Cotton, Debbie Horwitz and Susan Romaine collaborated to form PORCH about six months ago and have started collecting food with the help of 20 volunteer neighborhood organizers.
PORCH emails donors each month with a list of items needed at local food pantries. Donors then put a bag with a few canned goods on their front porches on an appointed day and neighborhood organizers go porch-to-porch to collect the donations.
“We’ve been really strapped,†said Bernice Harrison, who runs the food pantry at St. Joseph CME Church. “The carloads full of food from PORCH could not be coming at a better time.â€
More than 200 residents in 15 neighborhoods throughout Carrboro and Chapel Hill already participate in the monthly food drives, with about $2,000 in cash and food donations collected in May alone, but PORCH is still working to expand its network of neighbors. In addition, organizers hope to collect fresh produce from local farmers to supplement the food already distributed each month to refugee families from Burma.
For more information or to get involved, email info@porchnc.org or visit porchnc.org
—Staff Reports