About FastRoots
Someone who lives nearby picks up the phone.
FastRoots builds a county’s verified food security data: every charitable food location reached by a person, re-verified on a recurring schedule, and put to work by the funders, coalitions, and providers who serve that county.
The verification is the work
Anyone can assemble a list of food pantries. The hard part is knowing it’s still true. National directories carry enormous listing counts reviewed on multi-month, self-reported cycles. A regional food bank’s finder lists the pantries that partner with it, and each partner keeps its own entry current. We do the opposite: one county at a time, a person who lives nearby, a phone call to every location, and a re-verification round on a recurring schedule.
It’s slower and more expensive. It’s also why the data can answer questions a directory can’t: capacity, conditions, and the needs a provider couldn’t meet.
Our story
Born from necessity in Western North Carolina
FastRoots started during Hurricane Helene relief in the fall of 2024. Matt was working early-morning shifts on a sandwich assembly line in Asheville and saw lunches come back uneaten because another group had already fed that site and nobody knew. Addi was helping relief volunteers get specific supplies to places cut off by road damage. They met a few months later and settled on one problem: food relief groups working the same counties with no shared picture of who was where. That led to the American Red Cross grant, three organizations coordinating across 12 counties, more than 106,000 meals and food boxes, and the region’s first collective impact report.
Read the full story in Field NotesOur values
Verified, not assumed
Every provider is confirmed by a person who spoke to them. If we are not sure, we say so rather than publishing a guess.
Coordinate, don’t duplicate
We design for shared visibility and peer connection, not top-down control. One county picture everyone works from.
The public good is the point
The map is free for neighbors, in English and Spanish. Sponsors fund it and get the credit. They don’t get to gate it.
Providers never pay
Being listed and verified costs a provider nothing, ever. Their individual data is not what we sell, and the analytics come back to them free.
Meet the team
Matt Corzine
Co-founder & CEO
Matt spent 13 years at GSA National and left about a month before Hurricane Helene, ready to work on a different kind of problem, closer to home. He started FastRoots during the relief effort and made the Henderson County calls himself: every location, twice so far.
LinkedIn
Addison “Addi” Fuller
Co-founder & Strategic Advisor
Addi built the first version of FastRoots in the days after Helene, routing supplies to places the roads couldn’t reach. Before that he was an executive at a fast-growing construction technology company, where he built the product, brand, and people-operations teams.
LinkedIn
Molly Hylemon
Graduate Research Steward
Molly Hylemon is a Master of Public Administration graduate assistant at Western Carolina University and a steward with FastRoots. This fall she is helping with the 2026 re-verification, confirming that the organizations in FastRoots’ data are current and accurate. She brings a background in public administration and project coordination to the team’s work with community foundations.
How we’re built
FastRoots is a social-purpose business. Sponsors fund the verification work and the county-wide picture it produces; providers are never charged and their individual data is never the product. The public map stays public.
It also means this is infrastructure a community can afford to keep. Coordination that depends on a waiver, a grant cycle, or a state budget line lasts exactly as long as that line does. County-scale food security data should outlive a legislative session.
Tell us your region.
If we’re building near you, we’ll show you the region live. If we’re not, founding sponsors choose where we go next.