Foodshare challenge collects food, money for local homeless shelters

For 14 years, Joan Holeman has spent her Saturday mornings in Carrboro, selling produce from Flat River Nursery and Farm, her family-owned business.

It’s the second time she’s been able to take part in the Triangle Foodshare Challenge —a collaborative effort between four local farmers’ markets to provide food and funds to area homeless shelters.

Shoppers and vendors donated 1,265 pounds of food — more than six times the average Saturday market total.

Combined with donations at three other Triangle locations, an expected 3,000 pounds of fresh, local food will reach homeless shelters to benefit the needy.

“It’s about helping other people,” Holeman said.

At Saturday’s first Triangle Foodshare Challenge, three farmer’s markets in Durham, Chapel Hill and Cary joined Carrboro in the donation effort.

“It was a huge goal to pull this off simultaneously at four markets across the Triangle,” said the program’s founder, Margaret Gifford.

The program aimed to raise 1,000 pounds of food from each market, but Gifford said she recorded a preliminary total of 2,703 pounds Saturday afternoon.

Gifford said she is still pleased with the results and expects the total to exceed 3,000 pounds once check donations are accounted for.

“We were really excited,” she said. “We raised money, awareness and really fresh food.”

Created in May 2009, the program placed a donation bin at the Carrboro market for vendors to give leftover goods to the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle, a local non-profit that delivers food to area shelters.

Last September, organizers decided to create the Farmer Foodshare Challenge.

At the challenge, shoppers purchase extra food or donate money to the program. Farmers also donate their unsold goods.

“We had never explicitly asked shoppers to contribute,” Gifford said. “Last year’s event was kind of the farmers of Carrboro market challenging the shoppers of Carrboro market to match their numbers.”

Carrboro resident and Cane Creek Farm volunteer Brad Weiss said the program provides market regulars with an easy way to help those in need.

“In some ways, what’s great about it is it takes what people do in the normal course of marketing and allows you to do something very simple, which is just buy a little extra and donate it,” Weiss said.

The program provides a donation tent at every Carrboro market, but donations increase considerably on the day of the challenge.

“It’s well supported all the weeks,” said Kevin Meehan, owner of Turtle Run, an organic farm in Saxapahaw, N.C. “It’s become a popular year-round event, really, but this is just the hallmark.”

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