Loaves & Fishes founder and Holy Comforter parishioner Virginia Sampson is pictured on the left. Photos throughout courtesy of Holy Comforter
Pantry founded at Holy Comforter, Charlotte, now feeds the entire county
By Summerlee Walter
Holy Comforter, Charlotte, parishioner Virginia Sampson was concerned. Some of her Charlotte neighbors were hungry, and in the mid-1970s, there were no services to address food insecurity in the area. She rallied her fellow church members to address the need, and the Loaves & Fishes food pantry was born in the church kitchen in March 1975. During its first year of operation, the pantry served more than 1,000 people.
The last 50 years have seen changes and growth for the food pantry. Throughout the decades, it moved from the kitchen closet in Holy Comforter’s Henry Hall to the old youth building, then to Park Road Baptist when the youth building was torn down and replaced by the Van Every Building, where the pantry now lives in an expanded space dedicated to that purpose. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the church pivoted to offer drive-up grocery distribution before moving back inside once it was safe.
In 2021, Loaves & Fishes, by that time a multi-site independent nonprofit, merged with Friendship Trays, a Meals on Wheels affiliate in Mecklenburg County, and moved into a new warehouse space to accommodate the volume of food the organization distributes. In 2024, the merged organization became Nourish Up. While Nourish Up now supports dozens of pre-boxed and client choice food pantries across the county, a drive-thru pantry, grocery delivery, Meals on Wheels and a variety of tailored meal options, Holy Comforter still runs one of the few Nourish Up pantries in the county open five days a week.
Like all Nourish Up pantries, Holy Comforter’s site offers seven days, or 21 meals, of nutritionally balanced groceries, including meat, fresh produce and canned goods from the Nourish Up warehouse, supplemented by donations made directly to the pantry. Dedicated teams of volunteers staff the pantry 10 a.m.- 12 p.m. five days a week. The church feeds approximately 250 people in 80 families each week. Through a partnership with Promising Pages, families also receive free children’s books with their groceries.
While the 30-35 weekly pantry volunteers might be the most visible supporters, feeding the community is a church-wide effort. Parishioners support Nourish Up financially and with supplemental donations of food and toiletry products to round out the staples families receive. A series of dedicated pantry coordinators—Virginia Sampson, Bea Taylor, Marian Wood, Meg Brewster, Sarah Lofton, who recently retired after 14 years, and current coordinator Jane Crutchfield—ensure everything runs smoothly. Every year, the youth group walks to the nearby Food Lion and splits into teams charged with buying a week’s worth of nutritious groceries to meet the needs of a specific pantry family, like young parents with an infant or a mother with two teenage athletes, for $50. Recently, the children’s formation class packed toiletries and toured the pantry. Families from La Escuelita bilingual preschool, another Holy Comforter ministry, donated more than 325 pounds of food. On June 14, volunteers headed to the Nourish Up Hunger Hub warehouse to pack boxes of food for pantries around Charlotte.
Dedicated teams of volunteers at Holy Comforter, Charlotte, run one of the few Nourish Up pantries in the county to be open five days a week. The ministry has grown for 50 years since its founding as the Loaves & Fishes pantry at Holy Comforter in 1975.
“The heart of Loaves & Fishes here at Holy Comforter has always been our volunteers,” Lofton said.
The wider community also supports the pantry. During the early days of the pandemic, Kirt Hibbitts was volunteering on a Friday morning when a family arrived with a donation. While that is not unusual, the boxes and boxes of fresh produce and dairy products they carried through the door were. As Hibbitts learned, the family owned a restaurant they were forced to shut down for an unknown amount of time. “They had no idea if it was for a few days, weeks or months,” Hibbitts explained.
“They were in shock, and their immediate future was very uncertain. But faced with such loss and uncertainty, they knew that they could help someone else in need. They had a deep understanding of that feeling of loss and uncertainty, and they chose to give, to be generous with their bounty.”
The need for food assistance only continues to grow. Mac Redfern represented Holy Comforter on the Nourish Up board 2018-2024, and he reports that, during those six years, the organization grew from serving 70,000 people to 170,000 people.
As former Nourish Up board member Edie Livingstone observes, those tens of thousands of people are fed because one woman had a vision and the dedication to make it a reality.
“All the growth in pantries across Mecklenburg County and all the food and encouragement given out to thousands of our neighbors—it all started very simply with Virginia Sampson who had a good idea and the help of a few of her friends.”
Summerlee Walter is the communications coordinator for the Diocese of North Carolina.
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