For the last two years, Angela Baldwin has been one of many in Greensboro who depend on a local food pantry to make ends meet.
In her tight-knit Glenwood neighborhood, the pantry is run out of the carport of the old United Methodist Church on Glenwood Avenue. The city purchased the property back in 2023 and has worked with the neighborhood association and the grassroots group Food Not Bombs to provide food.
“I relied on it daily,” said Baldwin, who spoke to The Thread from her front porch. “Hundreds of people I know of rely on that pantry.”
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Those people were shocked Tuesday when a crew of city employees arrived without warning or announcement to begin dismantling the pantry. Food and supplies were tossed, a refrigerator lifted away with a crane.
A video of the incident taken by a local Food Not Bombs volunteer caught fire on social media this week, leading to outrage well beyond Glenwood.
In a widely criticized response, the city posted on its Facebook page on Wednesday evening, explaining it “took action immediately removing the units and avoiding a major health risk” after it allegedly received complaints from neighbors about unsanitary conditions at the pantry, drawing rats, roaches, and other vermin.
But those who depend on the pantry, as well as those who worked to provide the food, say the city should have worked with their struggling community to improve conditions. They say destroying rather than collaborating has damaged the hard-won trust between the city and this multi-racial, working-class neighborhood.
Concerns and Complaints
When the Glenwood food pantry was first organized in 2022, it was just a few tables of nonperishable food items and produce that Food Not Bombs collected from area businesses. After the city acquired the property, members got in touch with city employees, who approved the use of a refrigerator in the space to offer meat, dairy products, and eggs. A short time later, they got permission to use the back room, which they call the “stew,” where churches once made batch soups for dinners, for extra refrigeration units.
That’s how they managed to supply the Glenwood neighborhood with fresh food each week, according to Dayna Carr, the president of the Greater Glenwood Neighborhood Association.
“We really value the fridge,” Carr said. “It turns over an incredible amount of food.”
Watching it carried away was painful for neighbors and organizers, as was reading the city’s rationale in a Wednesday Facebook post. The post, which cast the dismantling of the pantry as an example of the neighborhood coming together, began with the proverb “It takes a village.”
“We never heard anything from the city. If they had offered us the opportunity of providing feedback, not only would all of our membership be out there with Clorox and gloves and paper towels, but we would have rallied support from our friends and neighbors in Glenwood to make it happen.”
Cathryn Bennett of Food Not Bombs
The city received complaints from area neighbors about unsanitary conditions at the site, the post explained.
“Unfortunately lack of maintenance and improper temperature controls caused the food to spoil and had even drawn insects and rats,” it read. “They told the city and we took action immediately removing the units and avoiding a major health risk. Hats off to those that care enough to take care of each other the way this group of citizens did and the city stands ready to assist with local partners to find solutions.”
Pictures accompanying the post show two mostly empty boxes of produce, the inside of a freezer, which was stained, and a zoomed-in photo of a rat next to the fridge.
The post was met with hundreds of angry comments, most decrying it as in poor taste and calling on the city to demonstrate a united village spirit by actually communicating and working with the neighborhood toward a solution.
Cathryn Bennett with Food Not Bombs said she’s aware the cleanliness standards of the fridge “weren’t perfect.” But she wishes the city had reached out with their concerns first. She and others who commented on the Facebook post also pointed out that the fridge was located outside and that animals showing up was inevitable and not something anyone can control.
“We never heard anything from the city,” she said. “If they had offered us the opportunity of providing feedback, not only would all of our membership be out there with Clorox and gloves and paper towels, but we would have rallied support from our friends and neighbors in Glenwood to make it happen.”
City Council Member Sharon Hightower represents District 1, including Glenwood.
While she agrees the city could have better communicated with the neighborhood, she said the state of hygiene made it unsafe for anyone.
“I think the concern was, this had become such a nuisance, the only way to rid the nuisance was to clear it out,” Hightower said.
“I know we had previously had conversations about what could be done there and what couldn’t, how things had to be done in order to keep doing this at that property,” Hightower said. “But maybe we could have taken a minute to say, ‘Okay, this isn’t good. Let’s call them and talk about this.’”
Hightower said she spent much of Wednesday responding to calls, e-mails, and messages about the way the city handled the pantry.
“Right now, I think there are a lot of people saying, ‘The city doesn’t care about people. This is what they always do,’” Hightower said. “Which I think is really unfair.”
“There’s nothing to say we can’t start over, clean it all up and have those conversations and agreements that need to be had,” Hightower said.
Those sentiments were echoed by Assistant City Manager Nasha McCray.
“Ideally, we would have had conversations on the front end to strategize around that,” McCray said. “But with the latest visit and complaints that we had on June 10, we had to take some immediate action, especially knowing some of the conditions of the food and those things being distributed to the community. We wanted to make sure that they had a safer alternative. And then we had to take quicker action.
Before the city owned and was responsible for the property, things may have been a bit looser, McCray said. But after it took possession, it became responsible for what happens there—which includes potential liability if people were to get ill from poorly stored and improperly refrigerated food.
The city has reached out to neighborhood leaders and organizers, McCray said, and hopes to work with them to find a solution that works for everyone.
But some close to the process said the damage to community trust by the city’s lack of communication and the self-congratulatory tone of its justifications may make that difficult.
‘It Was Malicious What They Did’
Michelle Kennedy is a former city council member who served as the head of Greensboro’s Housing and Neighborhood Development department from 2021 until March of this year.
During that time, she and her team worked closely with Glenwood as one of the city’s five reinvestment areas.
“There are really strategic intentions in Glenwood,” Kennedy said. “It was known there are relationships that have to be nurtured and protected. That’s the saddest part to me—how much trust was built and how much partnership was built before this.”
“During the time I was at the city, we were working in lock-step with the neighborhood,” said Kennedy. “We were working to help support food distribution activities there.”
Kennedy didn’t deny that the existing food pantry had problems with cleanliness and sanitation.
“Was it perfect? No,” Kennedy said. “Was it worth working in community to resolve? Absolutely.”
Kennedy has declined to talk about the reasons for her departure from the department. But she and several key department members all left around the same time. Multiple sources within city government told The Thread that department members felt their work and projects were being slow-walked and undermined by some city council members.
McCray acknowledged the city has not yet filled open positions in Kennedy’s former department, but said that wasn’t at the root of the problem in Glenwood.
The department worked for more than a year with the Glenwood Neighborhood Association to design a plan for transforming the church into a community center with climate-controlled refrigerated food storage. City documents show the job had been priced out. But little apparent progress has been made since then.
“It’s sad to see this now,” Kennedy said. “We had standing meetings with the neighborhood association, and if any problems came up, we strategized with the neighborhood and the partners—Food Not Bombs, the People’s Market, whoever it is—about how to address it.”
“That’s what it means to be in community with a neighborhood,” Kennedy said.
Carr echoed Kennedy’s frustrations.
“We have worked really hard as a neighborhood association to build a strong relationship with the city and have open lines of communication,” Carr said. “This is really causing me to pause and re-evaluate what our relationship looks like moving forward.”
Bennett said multiple city employees have reached out to her in the aftermath of the pantry sweep to request a meeting with the organization. But for now, Food Not Bombs is busy preparing a hot meal, which will be cooked and then distributed on Friday. Any meetings with the city will have to take place next week.
Bennet shared specific demands the organization has of the city: to replace the destroyed items, reimburse or replace the nonperishable food, and provide some recompense for the last two days for the people who have shown up to the space only to be met with an empty pantry, Bennett said.
“I think an apology to the Glenwood neighborhood would be well in order,” she added.
Residents like Angela Baldwin say they’ll have to find other sources of food to keep going in the meantime.
Baldwin, who helps Food Not Bombs clean the pantry and make deliveries on occasion, said the location was so popular it would be full one moment and within hours, it would be empty again.
“I cried when I found out because I’m worried about myself, but also about how families with kids are going to feed themselves,” she said.
She wishes that instead of clearing out the pantry that the city had worked with Food Not Bombs and residents to create a better solution, one that would help the most vulnerable in the community.“It was malicious what they did,” she said. “People are going hungry daily. This was just a step closer to fighting that and making it better. And this took us 25 steps backward. They took food out of children’s mouths. They didn’t help us, they hurt us.”
Sayaka Matsuoka is a Greensboro-based reporter for The Assembly. She was formerly the managing editor for Triad City Beat.
Joe Killian is The Assembly’s Greensboro editor. He joined us from NC Newsline, where he was senior investigative reporter.
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