By Kirk Ross
Staff Writer
As you might expect heading into Thanksgiving week, the offices of the InterFaith Council for Social Services in downtown Carrboro are hopping.
On Monday, assisting to meet the heavier-than-usual demand was a contingent from United Methodist Church, focused on the distribution of some of the 840 holiday meals the IFC will distribute this season.
Relatively speaking, the upstairs offices that manage the organization’s facilities, staff and its corps of 600 volunteers were calm, and Chris Moran, the person at the helm of the enterprise seemed a calm fellow. Though maybe more like calm and intense.
“We’ve always got plenty of volunteers around Thanksgiving and Christmas,†he said, then leaned forward in his chair. “Come see me around July 13.â€
The Adrian, Michigan native has a long history of fighting the good fight, starting in his late teens when he helped organize his neighborhood in a successful battle for public services.
A new outlook
Moran arrived in Chapel Hill and started working as a consultant for the IFC 25 years ago, eventually becoming the organization’s executive director. After steering the IFC through a financial crisis in the late 1990s, he had a crisis of his own – a brain tumor that nearly killed him. He went through 14 hours of surgery and a long recovery before being discharged on his birthday, April 22, 14 years ago. The experience changed his outlook and the way he goes about his work.
“I came out of that experience much more interested in details,†he said.
His memory, he says, is not what it was, so he relies on technology to manage those details.
For Moran and the staff at the IFC, details now matter more than ever. The organization is acting on plans to build a new men’s shelter on UNC-owned property off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and consolidate its kitchen and food pantry in a new building on Main Street in Carrboro.
Like the downtown shelter before them, both projects have been met with loud opposition from nearby neighborhoods. Despite that, Moran said he believes both projects will eventually win the support of the towns, because the IFC’s overall plan makes so much sense.
“We have to keep telling our story again and again and again,†he said, “so that people know that these are different programs than what we’ve been used to doing.â€
The IFC staff came to realize, he said, that having the kitchen and the shelter in the same place wasn’t a good idea.
“There are different populations coming into the same building getting different services,†Moran said.
“When you’re working with homeless people, they really want as few distractions as possible,†he said. “They’re working on goals and objectives, some sort of plan to get out of homelessness.â€
Under the new plan, the men’s shelter and medical services will be located on land owned by the university just off Martin Luther King Boulevard. Last week, the university’s board of trustees approved architect Josh Gurlitz’s design for the new building.
It made sense to consolidate medical services and the shelter, Moran said, as did putting the food operations under one roof.
Looking ahead
Next year, the IFC will submit an application to Carrboro proposing to move the food pantry, community kitchen and other food services to a new two-story building designed by architect Jim Spenser to be constructed on the site of the IFC offices on Main Street.
The need for that move, Moran said, was underlined by studies by UNC planning students that found a disconnect between the pantry and the kitchen.
“The studies found that a lot of people who used the kitchen didn’t use the pantry and a lot of people who use the pantry didn’t use the kitchen,†Moran said. “We decided that we wanted all of our food to come to one place, all our volunteers to come to one place and all those who are hungry to come to one place.â€
Moran said he knows that winning approval and constructing the buildings will require a long, tough effort. The IFC is willing to listen and adapt, he said. “If something makes sense, we’ll try it.â€
The struggling economy has made the need for improvements all the more evident. Every day, Moran said, he meets more and more people in terrible need, including growing numbers of older adults.
And with Orange County’s poverty rate soaring to 18 percent last year, as well as high unemployment and a collapsed mental health system, there isn’t a lot of hope for a let-up anytime soon.
The 3,100 families in Orange County who now receive food assistance from the IFC represent a wider cross section of the community than most people imagine, he said. “It’s an eclectic group of people coming in here all the time now. It’s different from previous years.â€
Moran said he’s worried that although it’s on the rise, poverty is still not on policymakers’ radar screen, even though it is the root of hunger and homelessness.
“I don’t understand why community leaders are not talking about it,†he said. “We’re willing to talk about building libraries and have landfill discussions and other things, but they’re not addressing poverty.
He leans forward in his chair again. “That has to change.â€