HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. — Like many smaller towns and cities surrounding Charlotte, the town of Huntersville is not immune to rising rent and equal access to basic needs.
If you drove down Old Statesville Road in Huntersville, you might pass an unassuming brick building. It's in the structure's basement where a mom and daughter have grown a food pantry.
Now, they’re leaving that building in the past.
“This was something that God told us to do," Sandra Marks tells WCNC Charlotte.
For Marks and her daughter Kenya Joseph, that instruction came about six years ago.
“We were watching a show on extreme couponing, and I’d never seen the show before, and we watched how a family got $200 worth of coupons and bought $200 worth of groceries for a family in the area," Marks recalled. "And we looked at each other at the same time, and that’s why we say it was God, because we both had the same idea that we could do this.”
That was back in 2017.
Hearts and Hands grew quickly, at times serving nearly 2,000 people a month in the Huntersville area. It's a part of the greater Charlotte area not often thought of when discussing food insecurity.
With just a couple of years into the nonprofit, the two were faced with a challenge no one truly knew how to navigate: COVID-19.
"That led to starting our delivery service in 2020, which was a huge thing too, because so many people became even more isolated," Joseph said. "Last year, we also added an additional service, which is called Mobile Pantry. So, we partner with other organizations, we partnered with some folks at Atrium [Health] to bring a little bit of a smaller version of our overall service directly into neighborhoods that have low food access.”
Cars would line the block for Hearts and Hands. However, the growth does not make the nonprofit immune to local problems.
Housing shortages and rapid growth continue to drive up rent both housing and commercial.
“In May, our landlord came to us and said he wanted to raise our rent, which calculated it out to be 200%," Joseph said. "We were like, OK, we gotta go.”
The conversation of expansion had already started, as the network of people Marks and Joseph serve continued to grow.
Now, the mom and daughter are getting ready to move into a bigger building, where their vision of future success is expanding in a different way.
"Counseling, mentoring," Marks said. "We want to help people not just meet that initial need because a lot of people have multiple needs.”
Hearts and Hands' new location is on Chesapeake Road in northwest Charlotte. The pantry is closed for now while the duo restocks its shelves, but hope to see you when they reopen their doors in mid-October.
Contact Kia Murray at kmurray@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, X and Instagram.
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