It’s a scene you might expect to see at an elementary school playground: children eating at picnic tables before running toward the field, climbing a play set, or doodling with chalk on the pavement. But it’s a hot summer evening, the games are donated, and for some of the kids, the meals are the only thing they’ve had to eat all day.
The children are benefiting from Nourishing Our Neighbors, a food security program organized by the Cary-based nonprofit A Doorway to Hope (ADTH).
ADTH helps low-income families in need across southwest Wake County with food, clothing, and other volunteer initiatives. Nourishing Our Neighbors primarily serves families in Chatham Estates, a mobile home park near downtown Cary.
Maria Young, the founder and executive director of ADTH, says most of the children in Chatham Estates attend Mills Park Elementary School in Wake County, where they receive free and reduced-price meals during the academic year. ADTH ensures the food supply doesn’t stop when the final school bell rings.
Originally, Nourishing Our Neighbors used U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant funds given to Wake County that Young noticed other programs weren’t utilizing. ADTH also partnered with a local church that would do back-end paperwork and organize meal reimbursements for past years.
But for this summer, Young says the person who helped handle the funding and reimbursement efforts had left Wake County. Instead of the USDA funds, Nourishing Our Neighbors now relies heavily on donations.
Under Young, Katie Oakley works to coordinate the summer sessions as ADTH’s food security team lead. Over the course of the program, she’s “fallen in love” with Chatham Estates and views it as a second home.
“Cary is often seen as an affluent town, but many people overlook the pockets of real need within it,” Oakley says. “Every community, no matter how prosperous it appears, has areas that could truly benefit from resources and caring volunteers.”
ADTH provides 100 meals “for 100 children,” Young explains, (although sometimes parents also eat) every night from Monday to Thursday, until August 21 when school starts back. Sometimes, there are enough leftovers for volunteers to hand out to hungry neighbors on the side of the street. On other days, the food is gone within 30 minutes.
The dinners are provided by Ruckus Pizza, Pasta, and Spirits, a Triangle-based restaurant chain. Every dinner follows nutritional guidelines to ensure nutritional balance, “as if this were a meal provided at a local school,” says Ruckus owner Phil Mastroianni.
Still, Mastroianni makes sure to provide a variety of meals throughout the summer to ensure the food is as delicious as it is healthy. He even brings ice cream on especially hot evenings.
“We know that sometimes this may be the only meal they have, so we really try to make sure that it has great nutritional value and is something that they like to eat,” he says.
Solguta Roblero and her three young daughters have been attending the Nourishing Our Neighbors distributions every day. The program helps her girls by providing them a place not only to eat but to safely play after being home all day, Roblero tells me with some help from Young translating.
Roblero has lived in Chatham Estates for the past decade, but she’s unsure how much longer she’ll be able to stay. The community was put up for sale in 2023 and remains on the market, leaving residents like her in a state of perpetual anxiety.
She’s been told to move, but there isn’t anywhere for her to go. Rent across Cary isn’t affordable for Roblero and relocating would likely require switching her daughters’ school away from Mills Park, which she says she absolutely doesn’t want to do.
“Every day we pray, every day,” she says.
Other families have already relocated. Endry Portillo drives herself and her two sons from Clayton to attend the distribution events.
Portillo used to live across the street from Chatham Estates in another mobile home community. Her sister-in-law, who still lives in Chatham Estates, told Portillo about the meal distributions.
Portillo makes the drive because Nourishing Our Neighbors provides more than just meals. Her boys get outside, try new things, and meet friends. And it’s not just the kids having fun— parents also get a chance to unwind, talk, and distract themselves from things at home or in the news.
“I hope that they continue doing it, this program, because as Hispanics, it’s hard for us to go out right now with things that are happening in the world, but [we] come here and see we’re all the same, we’re all together,” Portillo says. “It’s great for us.”
While Portillo unwinds with the other adults, volunteers hand out food and play with the children. Emma Hastings, a rising senior at North Carolina State University, helps through a partnership with ADTH and the NCSU swim team.
“The boys like to play with balls, like baseball, soccer. Like that, running around,” she says, pointing toward two older kids on the field. “The girls like to make jewelry. They make bracelets all the time.”
Hastings says she loves connecting with the Chatham Estates children. While some of the older kids speak English, she finds herself bonding with the younger ones, too.
“Even if they don’t even understand what you’re saying, they’re still adorable and they’re so nice,” she says, this time pausing to help a toddler find crayons to color with. “I love them all.”
Hastings, Young, Oakley, and Mastroianni are just a few of the faces behind the initiative. In Young’s words, it takes a village of people who care about tackling food insecurity to make Nourishing Our Neighbors effective.
Young remains adamant that ADTH keeps the program alive because the nonprofit, its partners and volunteers, and the Chatham Estates community all feel its impact. She thinks that as Cary residents realize the number of food-insecure children living alongside them, they’ll want to help, too.
“It’s your neighbors,” she says. “Your children have gone to school with these children, and these families could use a little bit of a hand here. A lot of people will, you know, pitch in.”
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