A Simple Gesture Wins Grant to Expand Food Access Advocacy in Guilford County

A Simple Gesture won new backing from the Foundation for a Healthy High Point to do more than move donated food from doorsteps to pantries. The Fall 2025 award will fund advocacy and education work in Guilford County, including ride-alongs, meetings with elected leaders, and efforts to expand food recovery in local schools and businesses.

The project is titled “Advocacy and Education for Stronger Food Systems,” a label that matters for a nonprofit built around volunteer pickup routes and pantry deliveries. Under the grant, A Simple Gesture will explore creative solutions for food deserts while also pushing local decision-makers to treat food insecurity as a community health problem, not just a charity issue. The foundation’s broader grantmaking focuses on upstream social influences on health and long-term solutions, which places A Simple Gesture inside a countywide strategy rather than a stand-alone hunger response.

That shift fits the scale A Simple Gesture has already built since 2015. The organization says it has made food donation easier through its collection programs, and its GuideStar profile says it has collected more than 5 million pounds of food from about 5,000 donors and more than 100 local businesses. For staff and volunteers, the new funding gives added weight to the work that happens behind each green bag pickup, school refrigerator fill, and business recovery stop. It also gives the organization more room to connect volunteer recruitment, route coordination, and pantry partnerships to a public case for why food access is a systems issue.

The grant also lands in the middle of a tighter county response network. Guilford County’s OneGuilford: Support Our Pantries effort has included regular calls with A Simple Gesture, the Greater High Point Food Alliance, Second Harvest Food Bank, and other partners to assess needs and resource gaps. The county tied that coordination to a SNAP benefits pause effective Saturday, November 1, 2025, underscoring how quickly local food demand can shift and why steady recovery operations matter.

The foundation’s support is also part of a pattern. It gave A Simple Gesture $50,000 in Fall 2022 to expand the RePurpose food recovery program, another $50,000 in Fall 2023 to deepen RePurpose in Greater High Point, and $50,000 in Fall 2024 for an awareness campaign focused on food-access tools in Guilford County. This year’s award moves the relationship further upstream, signaling that local philanthropy sees food recovery, advocacy, and public education as one connected strategy for Guilford County.