Community Table

On the third Saturday of every month, we offer community, fellowship, and free groceries to our neighbors.

While providing food to a family in need can be a huge help in that moment, hunger and poverty are complex and cannot be solved through the simple giving of food. We are attempting to address several of the barriers that the marginalized, especially recent immigrants, face in Cornelius: isolation, barriers that limit access to healthy food and skills to create healthy meals, barriers to language development, barriers to meaningful community, and barriers to leadership.

Ending hunger cannot be considered an us-and-them situation with those of us with more resources seeking to solve “their” problems, seeking to “help” “them.” We as a community are called to help one another grow, to amplify the voices of our neighbors, to receive the talents and contributions our neighbors can make in our lives, to promote healthy living for all and to work for change in systems that damage all of us. We sought to be creative in addressing hunger and poverty and to make the process of change an enjoyable one.

The work has not been completed, but we believe that we have made steps forward in our relationships with our neighbors and have invested in their well-being as well as in our own. Now we will ask the question, “What's next?”