The Shalom Project challenges the cycle of poverty in our community with a spirit of inclusion, compassion, and justice. You can learn more about The Shalom Project by visiting their website , their Facebook page , or their Instagram page. They started with a clothing closet, and then began to respond to various needs in the community, eventually growing their offerings to include a food pantry, an afterschool program, and a Narcotics Anonymous group. In I started working with these programs as an intern from the Wake Forest School of Divinity, and eventually helped form them into a single stand-alone nonprofit organization.
Making that transition allowed these programs, which were providing sustainable support to the community, to have better longevity and provide more funding. The Shalom Project currently offers five different programs under the umbrella of our organization. We divide our programs into basic needs programs, which include our food pantry, clothing closet, and medical clinic, and systemic needs programs, which include The Flourish Initiative and the Peters Creek Community Initiative.
None of these services were halted due to the pandemic, but we have made adjustments to support the health of our community. We serve an average of 80 families a week. Each family is eligible to come once a month, so we serve approximately families a month. People are able to get groceries to feed their families for about days, as well as clothing items for the entire family. We also partner with the Diaper Bank of North Carolina and are one of the primary distributors of diapers and resources for mothers with babies.
On Wednesday evenings we do a free medical clinic at W. We see people for primary care needs, and we have a physician-dispensed pharmacy to provide free pharmaceuticals to our patients. The Flourish Initiative is designed to provide female heads-of-household support on their journey out of poverty.
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This leads them to lean into the services that we and other organizations provide. Ultimately, our goal is to increase access to affordable housing so that more people can afford their basic needs β food, clothing, and medical care. Those interns have been extremely helpful not only in the planning process of the event but also in helping to support our other programs in order to give our staff more capacity to work on the fundraiser. Once a week, Campus Kitchen delivers recovered food from campus and local grocery stores to our pantry.
