Happy Holidays! 
It’s been a long time since we have shared an update. This is because we have been hard at work with all our projects over the past year! The larger local Raleigh community helped host many clothing and canned food drives throughout the year for us. Which we deeply appreciate! Thank you to all who have donated and raised funds and physical donations for us! From Fall 2021 to Winter 2022 our projects have fluctuated in goals, structure, and accomplishments. And we have many pictures to share! :) 

Our general distribution events (Distro) is going strong. We are out at Moore Square Park every Saturday from 3pm-5pm rain or shine. We haven’t missed a weekend since we began in the Summer of 2020 and consistently have had a line of guests waiting for us. We are mainly located at the corner of Martin St and Person St. Distro is open to everyone to volunteer or to pick up food from. Anyone is welcome, come visit us sometime!

Our grocery delivery project is a small team that has been delivering and coordinating for almost two years now, successfully since their hiatus. Unfortunately as we've reached the end of this month December 2022, they will return to a short hiatus for a few weeks. They are searching for a few more hands to help with their operations. We value self-care and seek to prevent burnout as often as we can. If you'd like to join our grocery delivery team, we need packers and drivers to help get their program back on track!

Our hot meals team, that make meals to go out to distro, have a positive update paired with a bit of a setback! Pullen Baptist Church on Hillsborough St. has allowed for us to utilize their kitchen from 8am to 3pm every Saturday. We made some pretty lovely meals, but unfortunately, this timing came a little late because our volunteer cooks needed to take a break. We have struggled to get our meals team fully functioning again. We still have access to the kitchen, we just need more confident cooks and preparers to lead the way! Please don't hesitate to reach out to us to learn more about the meals team and help us get their operations up and running again!

Our Weekday Meals project is a small team that goes out during the weekday evenings to give out hot meals and toiletries. It is a scaled down version of our Distro. Currently they go out only on Wednesday evenings to give out supplies and meals. However they have been consistently achieving this at least one day of the week for the past year! They could always use more hands to help accomplish their goals!

If you would like to learn more about how you can individually volunteer with any of the teams discussed above, visit our link tree and fill out our volunteer form!

Our Food Not Lawns project has had its ups and downs this growing season, but we wholeheartedly believe in the mantra "an imperfect garden is better than no garden." This year was a big year to learn from mistakes and go back to the drawing board. They tried a new method of taking care of gardens and finished building out garden spaces. And unfortunately, we had to retire quite a few gardens that had been worked on previously. Nonetheless we still grew food and learned new skills together as a group!

Our Clothes Not Bombs project is doing well and thriving! They fulfill a ton of special requests and physical donation needs weekly. These requests range from baby supplies, cribs, diapers to tents, work boots, sleeping bags and blankets. There was a large coat drive held in October that helped us get a lot of warm coats and warm clothes to people. The only consistent issue that is faced is the need of space for storage and the volunteer power to sort through it all. We recently held a sorting party to help assess this issue for CNB and we knocked out a lot of work for them! We plan on offering a sorting party quarterly from now on so volunteers have easy access to volunteering and can make CNB's work easier.

Over the course of the past few years, we have noticed a consistent issue that comes up with our operations. This is a need for a physical space. Our Slack communications can be challenging to navigate and not having a regular indoor meeting space makes it difficult for volunteers to join or feel confident in taking part. We struggle with having enough space to easily store and manage our donations, but we make it work the best we can.  We are excited to announce, a team of FNB volunteers have created a collective to work towards building such a space for us to utilize. Raleigh United Mutual Aid Hub aka RUMAH, is seeking to lease a building to house all of our operations as well as to uplift other local mutual aid efforts and organizations that align with our values. We are so excited to build community with the rest of you all through RUMAH. If you haven't seen their fundraising effort, please check out their OCF profile here: https://opencollective.com/rumah

They have raised over $20k in donations but need $3k in monthly sustainers to move foward with a place. Please consider becoming a monthly sustainer for them, as they will be our future in sustainability and building community with you all. We have attached a picture of a potential space they really would love to have, but they have not yet acquired. We share this so you can dream with us, even if it's not this space they lease. Much love and gratitude to all who support our Mutual Aid endeavors. We keep us safe, the community keeps us safe.

In Solidarity and Radical Love,

Food Not Bombs Raleigh