More than 4.5 million of our fellow North Carolinians are currently out of work, and over 18,000 restaurants have closed throughout North Carolina as a result of COVID-19. Those closures also have a ripple effect, threatening the survival of the farms who supply those businesses with food.
So when the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (CFSA) reached out to Farmer Foodshare with an innovative way of providing sustenance to communities – one that would benefit local farmers AND support local restaurant and hospitality workers through the crisis – we were ALL IN.
Starting May 18, Farms Serving Hospitality and Restaurant Employees (FarmsSHARE), a pilot project of CFSA, is providing free boxes of locally grown produce and optional eggs and meat to 2,500 out-of-work restaurant and hospitality workers across NC.
The program will continue weekly for the next 8 weeks, supplying a total of 20,000 food boxes.
A project of this scale and scope can’t be done alone. On the front-end, Farmer Foodshare provided direct outreach to Triangle-area restaurant owners who had employed workers who could benefit from the program. Going forward, we’re sourcing, packing, and distributing 300 of the food boxes each week to Triangle-area restaurant and hospitality workers. Other food hubs, farmers, and farmer cooperatives across the state have been involved in the planning as well and will be integral in getting the boxes to workers in Charlotte, Boone, Wilmington, and Richmond County.
The program is funded by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (Blue Cross NC) and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation (Blue Cross NC Foundation), as well as Carolina Farm Credit and Xylem Watermark, Xylem’s Corporate Social Responsibility Program, among others.
Farmer Foodshare is proud to help feed the folks who regularly feed us all!