With a Little More Kindness
New food truck helps Maggie Kane ’13 extend her mission of bringing good food and community to people, regardless of their means. Photography by Joshua Steadman.
Maggie Kane ’13 is almost laughably hard to catch up with. She doesn’t seem to sit for longer than three minutes at a stretch. Shortly after taking a seat outside A Place at the Table (APAT), her pay-what-you-can nonprofit cafe in downtown Raleigh, someone approaches from the sidewalk and talks with her about volunteering. She hops up and walks him to the counter inside. Then she’s back, talking of the meeting she came from, and another that she’s headed to next.
This is Kane — always on the move, in constant motion from one thing to the next. So it makes sense that her business is now taking on her personality. With APAT at capacity, the restaurant is going mobile with a food truck, called the Travelin’ Table. The cafe’s popular biscuit sandwiches (Sammys), chicken and dumplings, and cinnamon buns will now be rolling to destinations like the Boys & Girls Club of Zebulon.
Kane sees the truck as an extension of APAT. The Travelin’ Table is “bringing our mission out into the community, [and] bringing our mission outside of the brick-and-mortar confines of APAT… We’re going to get to know these kids and really develop community with them.”
The truck is a remodeled chuck wagon that in a previous life served up big Kahuna burgers and pineapple whip soft serve ice cream as Pineapple Express. It’s been completely renovated over the past year and filled with new kitchen equipment: a flat top grill, a chargrill, a two-burner stove, two ovens, two fryers and refrigeration. A generator provides electricity, and propane powers the cooking equipment.
Travelin’ Table is staffed by a mix of volunteer and paid workers and can be booked for corporate events and parties, though it will primarily serve other nonprofits. “We’re specifically targeting youth-serving organizations… working with schools and different places that serve youth,” says Kane. And after that? “My hope is that [the food truck] can support the mission and the financial sustainability of [A Place at the] Table, because what we do every day does not support financial sustainability. We lose money every day.”
“What we do every day does not support financial sustainability. We lose money every day.” — Maggie Kane ’13
As a charitable organization and nonprofit, APAT’s financial sustainability, or lack thereof, is not as dire as it is for the for-profit retail and restaurants that surround it on Hargett Street in downtown Raleigh. The restaurant doesn’t need to make money above its operational costs to continue to serve. But the income it generates can help cover further activities and outreach. When diners enter the cafe, they can pay the suggested price of their meal, pay less than the suggested price, volunteer at the cafe to pay for that meal, or, as a final option, pay above the suggested price, giving an additional donation.
“We have so many more supporters now… we would not be here today if it wasn’t for that,” Kane says. There are between 100 and 150 workers at the cafe each day who put in volunteer hours, serving more than 225,000 meals over the last seven years.
Hunger and food insecurity plague this state. According to Gene Nichol, a professor of law at UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina has one of the country’s fastest-rising poverty rates, ranked 12th currently, and up from 26th 10 years ago.
In his book, The Faces of Poverty in North Carolina, Nichol lists the state as having almost 1.8 million people classified as hungry, which is one of the highest numbers in the nation. Close to one in four — that’s nearly 560,000 — of North Carolina’s kids didn’t get enough to eat last year.
Kane knows the mountain these numbers represent: “I am not on this earth to end hunger by 2050. That is not my goal… I am on this earth to make any person that walks through the doors of A Place at the Table feel loved and cared for and appreciated and a part of something.”
“I think this world needs a little more kindness. With a little more kindness, anything is possible.”
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