Key takeaways:
- Food insecurity in Guilford County is rising sharply, with demand up 20 percent so far this year. Nearly one in four children don’t know where their next meal will come from.
- Federal SNAP cuts and new work requirements are pushing more people toward food pantries, with North Carolina SNAP participant rolls shrinking by more than 110,000 since September 2025.
- Nonprofits like Guilford County’s A Simple Gesture warn that private charity can only fill a small fraction of the gap, since the federal government has traditionally covered about 95 percent of the nation’s food safety net.
In 2015, a group of concerned Guilford County residents decided to collect food from their neighborhood to help families in need.
That first year, 180 families signed up to give food. Today, more than 4,500 people donate once or twice a month to the nonprofit A Simple Gesture.
The nonprofit, working with dozens of other organizations and companies, has helped coordinate the collection and distribution of enough food to equal nearly 10 million child-size meals during the past 11 years…