Eagle Scout installs blessing boxes to fight food desert hunger in Greensboro
Blessing boxes outside St. Mary’s Catholic Church were emptied and refilled in less than a week, showing how hard southeast Greensboro’s food desert is hit.
Ander Wickline, a Boy Scout Troop 244 member, installed blessing boxes near St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Duke Street and Gorell Street as his Eagle Scout project, and the church’s volunteers said the larger boxes were emptied and refilled in less than a week. The fast turnover turned a small patch of sidewalk into a visible sign of how many people in southeast Greensboro are trying to get by with limited grocery access.
Federal researchers map food-access problems by census tract through the USDA’s Food Access Research Atlas, the standard tool for identifying low-income, low-access areas. University of North Carolina at Greensboro community research has said Greensboro has 17 identified food deserts and Guilford County has 24, a backdrop that helps explain why a few weatherproof boxes at St. Mary’s drew so much use so quickly.
The need is measurable. Feeding America estimates 82,510 Guilford County residents were food insecure in 2023, a rate of 15.2 percent. The same data puts the county’s child food insecurity rate at 22.5 percent, or about 27,110 children, with an annual food budget shortfall of $57.7 million and an average meal cost of $3.69. In a county where families are already stretching dollars at the checkout line, a box stocked with canned and shelf-stable food can make the difference between a meal and an empty pantry.
St. Mary’s says its roots in southeast Greensboro go back to 1928, when land was purchased on the Duke and Gorrell streets corner for the church’s expansion. The parish has long served the area’s Black Catholic community, and its social outreach deepened during the pandemic as clergy and parishioners built out direct aid for neighbors facing poverty. Church members said they had maintained smaller blessing boxes for years, but the need grew beyond what those boxes could handle.
Wickline said he wanted his Eagle Scout project to do real work, and the sturdier boxes were built to be useful, not symbolic. Parish volunteers said they appreciate the community response and are considering ways to add fresh foods, which would extend the effort beyond shelf-stable basics and further fill a gap that Guilford County officials are now tracking through a food-resources data hub and Grocery Gap Dashboard.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
