The Goldsboro Family YMCA’s new Community Corner is a housing and staging area for donations of shelf-stable foods and personal items. But it’s so much more than that, according to Casey Young, Director of Community Impact for the Y. It’s part of their mission work to feed those in need in their community, and it has provided a new opportunity for member engagement and volunteerism.

“At the beginning of the pandemic when we were shut down, the local United Way reached out and asked if we could help deliver meals to Wayne County Public Schools (WCPS) students. We started delivering five meals and ended up delivering thousands. This opened our eyes that there was a gap in our community that we could fill and that we needed to work harder on this,” Young said. 

The Y has expanded its work as a USDA Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) sponsor and was approved in December as a USDA Child and Adult Food Care Program (CACFP) sponsor through this work the Y is fighting food insecurity to address one of the social determinants of health (SDOH) and provide access to healthy food for more children.  Young said the Y also wanted to provide for the families and seniors that don’t benefit from those federal programs.

So volunteers and staff repurposed and transformed an underutilized space at the Y during a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service activity. Shelving and pallets were installed, tables brought in, and now volunteers join together there to help assemble food boxes. The Y is providing food boxes twice a month to migrant family workers and to people new to the community through a partnership with the school district, and to another local nonprofit Kriquette’s Kids. 

“We had been struggling to re-engage members and bring volunteers back and have them feel safe. The Community Corner is centrally located in the Y so members are seeing that and dropping off donations, and it’s been a great way to get volunteers involved again,” Young said.