Nestled in central North Carolina, High Point boasts a thriving private university and a bustling Furniture Market bringing in clientele from across the world. The city of 110,000 residents also joins nearby cities, Greensboro and Winston-Salem, to form an economic hub known as the Triad.  At first glance, High Point seems set up for success—a place to settle down for work and family—and certainly not a place where residents go hungry. It turns out, it depends on your ZIP code.

In September 2019, the High Point Enterprise reported that the city’s 27260 ZIP code ranked as the 4th poorest in the state. According to Census Bureau data compiled by the American Community Survey/NC State Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy in some census tracts fell nearly 20 years less than others in the same county.  And in 2015, a survey by Gallup and the Food Research and Action Center discovered that the Greensboro-High Point metropolitan statistical area (MSA) landed in the top 10 MSAs with the highest levels of food hardship in the U.S.

Not surprisingly, the statistics also showed racial disparities. While High Point is roughly 44% white, 34% Black, and 10% Hispanic, a 2019 report by the N.C. Poverty Research Fund states, “Black and Hispanic residents are poor at more than double the rate for white residents.”

Feeding Change Through the Food Alliance

Community organizers, like Rev. Carl Vierling, didn’t turn a blind eye. Five years ago, Vierling spearheaded the creation of the Greater High Point Food Alliance to build a wide network and find innovative solutions to food insecurity. Since then, the Food Alliance has hit the ground running in connecting funders to community organizations and, ultimately, to the people of High Point who have been systematically overlooked.

For Vierling, these strategic funding connections are formed through just one question: “Where do our missions intersect, and is that a place that we can find common ground?”

As a result, the common ground in High Point has literally become fertile. Since 2016—through collaboration with the City of High Point, High Point University’s AmeriCorps VISTA program, Guilford County Schools, neighborhood associations, the Hayden-Harman Foundation, and others—the city has established 30+ community gardens for food insecure residents.

There was such a burst in the urban agriculture scene that it spurred the creation of a nonprofit called Growing High Point. Meanwhile, these community gardens provide food for the farmer’s market housed at the High Point Public Library and for food pantries like that found at Burns Hill—a neighborhood that shares an intentional, long-standing partnership with the Food Alliance.

Over the summer, the community garden at Burns Hill grows green beans, squash, tomatoes, and carrots. This fall, the garden is growing collards due to demand, and the garden’s fresh produce adds directly to the stocks in the Burns Hill Food Pantry. Both ventures were launched in 2015-16 after Vierling approached Jerry Mingo when major grocery stores closed and the neighborhood’s 500+ residents were left in a food desert. Mingo has been a resident of Burns Hill for 56 years and serves as president of the Burns Hill Neighborhood Association.

The Neighborhood Association/Food Alliance partnership is an example of Vierling’s hyper-local approach, which is bottom-up rather than top-down. The approach has been put to the test with the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Vierling said the food insecurity rate in High Point jumped to 31%. Those affected by pandemic closures were those who could least afford it after losing service industry and restaurant jobs, and food pantry use in the city doubled while pantry donations declined.

Leveraging Funds to Support Relationships

“When things get bad, if you don’t have that backbone that already has all these relationships, already has all the data, already has these connections to funders, and a technical assistance expertise … if those things aren’t there, it’s kind of chaos,” said Rev. Dr. Joe Blosser—a Food Alliance board member, professor of religion and philosophy, and founding director of the AmeriCorps VISTA program at High Point University.

The Food Alliance had that backbone, and cashing into the organization’s established relationships, local funders stepped up to support financially.

“The Foundation for a Healthy High Point knew that we didn’t have the on-the-ground knowledge to quickly get our support to food insecure people in the midst of crisis,” the Foundation’s Interim Executive Director Allen Smart said. “But we also needed a partner that we knew had some very neighborhood-specific connections and was flexible rather than having a hard-wired, big bureaucracy guiding the efforts. Every community needs a group like the Food Alliance in these times.”

It’s a lesson other donors can take to fund on-the-ground safety nets rather than big players. Here are some examples from the Food Alliance and its partners:

- The Foundation for a Healthy High Point provided a non-restricted capacity grant of $50,000 to the Food Alliance during COVID, which the Food Alliance has used to identify and fund emerging capacity needs for local food providers due to the pandemic. The Food Alliance purchased refrigerators, freezers, shelving, pallet jacks, and even a portable conveyor system to aid in improving capacity so that more residents could be served.

“We did step in as a funder and have served as a clearing house,” Blosser said. “A lot of the work with the Foundation for a Healthy High Point and their capacity building funds were in that vein, because we had the surveys around, ‘What do you need for capacity building? What do you need in order to take your work to the next level?’ We'd already been doing that stuff for the last several years.” (Of note, those surveys were conducted with the help of High Point University’s AmeriCorps VISTAs.)

The Food Alliance also made key networking connections for food providers. A local church agreed to adopt the food pantry at Hayworth Cancer Center, and another pantry is considering becoming a partner agency of the Second Harvest Food Bank, which will allow them to greatly increase the number of people they serve.

- The Earl and Kathryn Congdon Family Foundation provided funds to the Food Alliance to purchase hand sanitizer, masks, and plastic grocery bags for food pantries, so that pantries wouldn’t incur out-of-budget expenses.

- A Simple Gesture, headquartered in Greensboro, is a nationwide organization that collects non-perishable food donations from community members and delivers to local food pantries. The organization received networking and funding support from the Foundation for a Healthy High Point when expanding into the city and also met with the Food Alliance to determine where the food should be going. In fact, it was A Simple Gesture that jump-started the Burns Hill Neighborhood Pantry -- another example of the Food Alliance leveraging established relationships to meet common goals.

- The Food Alliance’s High Point “Food Finder” app offers listings for pantries, backpack programs, emergency assistance, shelters, and more. It was available before the pandemic but received 4,500+ downloads in a 3-month period during COVID. For another access point to resources, the Hayden-Harman Foundation marketed more pandemic-specific information (COVID testing, sanitation supply giveaways, filing unemployment) with HighPointResources.org. Word was spread through yard signs and a local TV segment.

- The Hayden-Harman Foundation—in partnership with the City of High Point, Open Door Ministries, and others—also opened sanitation/handwashing stations to help reduce risk of COVID transmission for people experiencing homelessness.

“It really is the investment in relationships and moving away from a charity model where you’re looking at investment in the community with expectation of a return,” Vierling said. “We’ve got to create sustainable systems.”

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Original contribution by Yasmin Bendaas, science writer based in North Carolina.