On the second Tuesday of every month, grocery bags start appearing on front porches in Cary’s Silvercreek neighborhood.
What’s inside varies each month. In September, with school back in session, the bags were full of lunchbox snacks.
In the late afternoon, Marcy Holland and her husband make the rounds to pick up the bags. The next day they load the car and deliver the food to the pantry at Cary First Christian Church, a couple of blocks from their home, in time for its Wednesday evening distribution.
“What you leave on your front porch in the morning can be on someone’s dinner table that evening,” says Christine Cotton, founder and CEO of PORCH Communities, the national hunger-relief nonprofit behind PORCH Cary.
PORCH Community founder Christine Cotton, left, surprises Cary volunteer Marcy Holland during a food pickup to assist individuals and families facing food insecurity.
Marcy is one of more than 1,000 volunteers who power PORCH. The movement began in 2010 as a single food drive in Christine’s Chapel Hill neighborhood. Today, it’s expanded to more than 85 communities in 16 states.
The model is simple. Each month, the local pantry tells its PORCH coordinator exactly which items it needs most. Neighbors buy those specific items and set them out on their porches, and volunteers collect them and deliver them. Altogether, PORCH has delivered more than $18 million in hunger relief across the US.
A Simple Question
The idea began years ago when Christine’s son started asking her to pack extra sandwiches in his lunch. She found out he was giving them to a classmate, who was taking them home to share with his brother for dinner.
“The boy was at my house, and I had no idea,” she says. “I was a PTA president. I thought I knew what was happening.”
That discovery led Christine to a question: What if neighbors worked together, in a small and easy way, to keep local food pantries stocked?
A Chapel Hill pantry needed canned tuna, so Christine asked her neighbors to leave cans on their porches. Then she collected them and delivered them. Her background was in project management, so from that very first month she counted the cans and tracked which neighborhoods took part.
Word spread from one neighborhood to the next, across Chapel Hill and on to Hillsborough and Durham. A woman visiting from Ohio for a UNC graduation heard about it and took the idea home with her.
Today, PORCH volunteers give more than 30,000 hours a year, supplying more than 200 local pantries. Last year alone, they provided meals for more than 100,000 people. The idea has staying power: Christine’s own neighborhood still takes part 15 years later.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Cary may not look like a place where people go hungry. But Marcy sees another side of it. As a home health physical therapist, she visits local homes each week.
“Cary can look very affluent, but everyone has a story, and you don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors,” she says.
Lori Webber, PORCH board member and the organization’s marketing adviser, says as many as one in seven people in Cary could be facing food insecurity.
Cary First Christian treats a youngster to a popsicle while his mother stocks up on basic food supplies.
“It’s college kids; it’s working families; it’s seniors,” she says.
Christine adds that many families are living right up to the edge of their paychecks, and one unexpected mishap, like getting in a car accident or losing a job, can push them over.
“People are strong and resilient,” she says. “They’re not walking around with signs that say they can’t feed their family.”
Coming to Cary
Marcy found PORCH the way many others have: on social media. After a friend who coordinates a PORCH neighborhood in Holly Springs kept posting about it, Marcy asked for more information. It wasn’t long afterward that she became the Silvercreek neighborhood coordinator.
“I’m a parent, and that thought of not being able to feed my kids …” she says. “To me, it’s a basic human right.”
She connected with her pantry by simply walking over to the church near her home during a Wednesday distribution and introducing herself. The pantry was previously stocked primarily by the church’s members.
“They were beside themselves when I offered,” Marcy says.
Lori says Cary was a deliberate target for PORCH, which has seen rapid growth across Wake County. Like those early days where word spread from Chapel Hill to Hillsborough and so on, Lori expects word to spread from Silvercreek, leading other Cary neighborhoods to soon join in.
A list of available foods and the quantities clients are allowed to take.
“Cary is such a philanthropic community,” Marcy agrees. “It’s a community that wants to take care of its own.”
Shopping to a List
What sets PORCH apart is its focus. Donors aren’t cleaning out their pantries; they’re shopping for exactly what local families need that month. Common requests include canned fish and meat, canned fruits and vegetables, rice, pasta, applesauce, and granola bars.
Each month’s call to PORCH donors depends on what the pantry requests. The coordinator communicates to ensure neighbors know each month what they can donate to help the most.
The monthly schedule matters, too. Lori says that because pantries know PORCH donations are coming regularly, they can spend their own money on fresh items such as meat, produce, and milk, expanding what’s offered to those in need. Neighbors who can’t shop for any reason can give cash or gift cards, and volunteers use those to buy what the pantry needs.
Lori Webber with PORCH Communities sorts donations collected through PORCH Cary’s food drive program.
For volunteers, the time commitment is small. Marcy spends three to five hours a month. About a week before collection day, she sends reminders by text, email, and Facebook and posts signs around the neighborhood with QR codes for new participants to sign up.
Neighbors can leave donations on their own porches for pickup or drop them off on Marcy’s porch. Afterward, she shares how much was collected, because she finds people are curious to know how it went. She reports her totals to PORCH each month, and the national organization has a system for tracking its impact, Christine says.
Every coordinator receives the same support through PORCH’s “Every Neighborhood Connected” model. It includes onboarding, a welcome kit, signs, flyers, and a marketing playbook, all at no cost to volunteers. Lori says financial donors make this possible.
“Someone who gives to PORCH is really funding the next neighborhood so people like Marcy don’t have any cost or expense,” she says. “They can just help their community.”
Cary First Christian’s food bank benefits from PORCH Cary’s community donations.
Neighbors Meeting Neighbors
Marcy’s ask for help within her 200-home neighborhood started with her circle of friends. That’s changing as she works to bring in more neighbors.
“I get so excited when it’s someone in the neighborhood that I don’t know,” she says. “They see the signs and sign up to volunteer.”
Special occasional themes, such as birthday cake kits or a spaghetti-and-sauce month, help keep people engaged. And Marcy has seen the impact on the other end firsthand. When it was school snack month, she saw families bring their children along to the pantry to pick out new and exciting snacks, something she says made kids’ eyes light up.
The next generation is getting involved as well. Through PORCH’s student ambassador program, Lori has spoken to students at Cary-area high schools about food insecurity, and some schools have organized their own food drives. Students go home and educate their parents as well, Lori says.
Marcy and Todd Holland pick up food donations in their community.
How to Help
Support for PORCH comes in many forms. Anyone interested can consider volunteering, donating food, or giving financially. It’s easy to get PORCH up and running in a neighborhood, Marcy says.
While the holidays are the season of giving, Lori emphasizes that the reach of PORCH extends into the new year.
“A lot of people do food drives at Thanksgiving or Christmas,” she says. “But then what happens the rest of the year? Those pantries count on us. People need to eat all year long.”
porchcommunities.org/cary
cary_nc@porchcommunities.org
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