Steve McCrossan, Executive Director
At NourishNC, we’ve learned something about disasters: you don’t get to choose what kind shows up.
For years, disaster response in New Hanover County meant hurricanes. In 2018, Hurricane Florence battered Wilmington, teaching us what happens when families suddenly lose access to food, schools close, and thousands of people need help at the same time.
Then COVID came along. Suddenly, “disaster” didn’t just mean wind, rain, and flooding. It looked like an uncertain future. Schools closed. Families lost jobs and income. Food became harder and more expensive to source.
Demand for NourishNC’s services surged almost overnight, and we operated in disaster response mode for nearly two years.
Thankfully, many of the lessons we learned during Florence helped us respond quickly and meet our community where the needs were greatest. We developed drive-thru systems, distributed food across neighborhoods, and found new ways to safely provide meals to children and families.
Now, we’re seeing another type of emergency: what I would classify as “policy disasters.” Changes in government programs, benefits, funding, or eligibility can quickly remove resources from families, creating the same result we see after other disasters: a sudden surge in hunger.
The cause may be different, but the challenge for NourishNC is the same: How do we get a lot of food to a lot of people, quickly, safely, and with dignity?
With these lessons in mind, we’ve spent the last several years deliberately building our disaster-response capacity. Earlier this year, we completed our new warehouse annex and walk-in cooler.
The expansion increased our food-storage capacity by 60%, added 66 pallet bays, doubled our fresh-food storage, and—through a critical improvement to our disaster response plan—created a covered, all-weather emergency distribution area.
But a bigger building doesn’t automatically make you ready for an emergency. And hope is not a disaster plan.
So, we stocked supplies. We designed systems. We developed a high-throughput drive-thru distribution model focused on speed, simplicity, dignity, and getting as much nutritious food as possible into the hands of those who need it most.
Then we did something even more important: we tested it.
Staff and volunteers recently conducted a full disaster-response simulation and stress test. And because Mother Nature apparently has a sense of humor, we did it in the pouring rain.
Perfect.
We moved cars through the system, tested traffic flow, loaded food, identified bottlenecks, watched what worked, found what didn’t, and asked ourselves one question over and over: What breaks when hundreds of families show up at once?
So far, thankfully, hurricane season has given us the opportunity to prepare rather than respond. We hope it stays that way.
The next time Wilmington needs us, the NourishNC team will be ready to respond.
But hope is not our disaster plan.
