Golden LEAF funds Greene County food distribution organization

A Greene County nonprofit has been awarded a $141,500 grant to expand its efforts to deliver food to needy residents.

Bountiful Blessings House of Redemption will use the money to purchase a box truck, cargo van, two pallet jacks, refrigerated container, electrical upfit for refrigerated container, two commercial refrigerators, tables, shelving and carts, said Barbara Bryant, who co founded the organization with Latosha King.

“We are excited about the Golden LEAF award. We are overwhelmed. We’ve been working on it for almost a year and we finally got an award,” Bryant said. “It’s a blessing to our nonprofit organization. Now we can get all the things we need to make our organization stronger.”

Bountiful Blessings was formed in the fall of 2017 to distribute food donations to families in Greene County. It operates out of St. John Kingdom Ministries fellowship hall in Snow Hill and receives food from the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, local farmers and Food Lion, Bryant said. “We can get those mobile mini storage units so that way we won’t be monopolizing the fellowship hall as much,” she said.

The organization serves 150 to 200 families a month, about 500 to 550 individuals.

Bryant said she is proud of the work Bountiful Blessings did during the COVID-19 pandemic by offering drive-up distribution days.

“You have to realize that nobody was working, and if you are not working you had no income coming in. And the children were not able to go to school so you had to have breakfast items, grits, eggs, cereals, breakfast bars, those types of things for kids,” Bryant said. “You were having to come up with all these ways to make a good bag, a good box for families in need.”

Bountiful Blessings distributes food every second and fourth Tuesday, Bryant said. The Food Lion in Snow Hill also donates perishable food items that go out either Saturday or Sunday, she said.

The group just got an upright refrigerator that it will use to store perishables like fresh vegetables without the risk of freezing, she said.

Bryant said the group found out last week that it was awarded the grant. Before the award is finalized, organizers have to undergo training for managing the grant dollars. They will then investigate purchasing the equipment.

“In the next couple of weeks we are going to be moving to make this happen as quickly as possible,” she said.

The grant is from the Food Distribution Assistance Program implemented by Golden LEAF and funded by $10 million from the N.C. General Assembly and the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Along with the Bountiful Blessings project, The Golden LEAF board awarded $937,551 in additional Food Distribution Assistance Program funding to support 23 existing projects in Alamance, Buncombe, Chatham, Cumberland, Durham, Edgecombe, Gaston, Harnett, Iredell, Macon, McDowell, Mecklenburg, Nash, Onslow, Rowan, Scotland, Transylvania, Union, Vance, Wayne, Wilkes and Wilson counties.