02 Oct Roots & Rescue: Rolling up our sleeves for our Charlotte community

Sometimes the best way to build community is to stop talking about impact and start making it together.

That was the idea behind our Roots & Rescue: Community Day, when members of the Charlotte B Corp Collective community spent the morning volunteering with The Bulb’s Rescue & Repackage Produce program.

The Bulb is a Charlotte nonprofit and mobile farmers market working to bring fresh, nutritious produce to underserved communities in and around Charlotte at no cost. Their motto says it well: Community led, community fed.

Our job for the morning? Sort produce.

But we quickly learned there is a lot more to sorting produce than putting the good apples in one box and the bad ones in another.

We learned how The Bulb rescues produce that might otherwise go to waste, much of it grocery store overstock, and sorts and repackages it into portions that make sense for the households they serve.

We also learned to look at food a little differently.

A bruised apple still has plenty of life left in it. A dark banana might be perfectly good as long as it is not mushy. Produce does not have to look perfect to be nutritious and delicious. At the same time, every item that goes to a neighbor should meet a pretty simple standard: Would you eat it yourself?

Working side by side, we sorted boxes of rescued fruits and vegetables, separated items for composting, and helped prepare food that would soon make its way to The Bulb’s mobile markets.

And there was a sense of urgency to the work. Almost everything we sorted that morning needed to be distributed before the weekend.

That connection between food rescue, food waste and food access became very tangible when you were standing in front of a box of produce deciding what could be saved.

This is exactly why we wanted to create Roots & Rescue.

The B Corp community spends a lot of time talking about using business as a force for good. We believe there should also be opportunities to step outside our workplaces, roll up our sleeves and put those values into action together.

Thank you to everyone who joined us and to The Bulb team for welcoming us into their work, teaching us along the way and showing us what community-led, community-fed looks like in practice.

We came to sort produce.

We left understanding a whole lot more about food rescue, food access and the work happening every week to get fresh food into the hands of our Charlotte neighbors.