Why We Called It FastRoots

Two years ago this week, Helene came through Western North Carolina.

Most of what I could say about it, anyone who was here could say too. We got through it. Neighbors showed up for each other with chainsaws, generators, spare bedrooms, and buckets of water for flushing toilets. Help came in from all over the country and from other countries, more of it than anyone could have expected. All of that is true, it is worth repeating every September, and it is not the reason I am writing this.

The reason is a crate of lunch boxes that came back.

Where I was

A month before the storm I had left GSA National, where I spent 13 years and helped build something I am still proud of. I was ready to work on a different kind of problem, closer to home. I did not know what that meant yet, only that I needed a clean break and some time to figure it out.

So when Helene hit, I was between things. That was the one unusual part of my situation. Our house had damage like everyone's, and a fair amount of the first weeks went to driving back and forth to Charlotte, the closest city the storm had missed, to load up on supplies and bring them back. But in between, I could volunteer in a way that a person with a job could not.

Some of those mornings started at 5:30 at Hearts with Hands, a disaster relief organization in Asheville that has spent years deploying to disasters in other places. This time the disaster was at home. The shift was an assembly line: lunch boxes down the table, peanut butter sandwiches, fruit, a bag of chips, lids on, into crates. Drivers were already lined up to run those crates all over the region so the emergency crews would have them by noon. It was dark. It was cold. Nobody in that line cared.

I went back for several of those mornings in a row, which is how I came to see the crates that came back.

More than once, a driver returned with lunches nobody had eaten. Not because the crew did not need to eat. Somebody else had shown up at that same site with food, and nobody at Hearts with Hands had any way of knowing. Two groups fed one crew, and a third crew somewhere went without.

I want to be careful here. This is not a criticism of Hearts with Hands or of anyone else who was working in those weeks. In a disaster response you do not build coordination systems, you run on whatever systems existed before the disaster. For charitable food in this region, there was nothing before. No shared list of who was serving what, where, and when. So the information moved the way it always had, by text message and word of mouth. Some of the sandwiches came back in the crate.

The same problem from the other end

My business partner, Addison Fuller, was living the same problem from the opposite direction. In the days after the storm he was working with disaster relief volunteers trying to get specific supplies to specific people in isolated spots that road closures and washouts had cut off. He built the first version of what became FastRoots right then, with those volunteers, to match a request in a cove to a driver who could reach it. He could see the need and had no view of the supply. I was standing next to the supply with no idea where it was needed.

We met several months after the storm and kept landing on the same idea: the food was there, the volunteers were there, and what was missing was a way to see both at once. Food was the place to start because it is the first thing people need and the thing most likely to go to waste.

That idea became a grant with the American Red Cross. During the long-term recovery, food relief organizations across 12 western North Carolina counties used a shared FastRoots map to coordinate the delivery of more than 106,000 meals and fresh food boxes through 45 relief centers.

What the recovery work taught us is that the coordination problem does not end when the disaster does. On an ordinary Tuesday, a school counselor in Henderson County who needs to send a family somewhere for food is working from the same kind of information the relief drivers had in October 2024: a list somebody printed, a pantry that moved, hours that changed last month. So FastRoots moved from disaster logistics to mapping a county's charitable food providers and keeping that map verified by a person, on a recurring schedule. Funders use it to decide where money does the most good. Neighbors use it to find food that fits what they need, when they need it.

Two years later

The outpouring after Helene was real, and it is still heartwarming to look back on. It is also true that the need has not let up. The people who run the pantries and meal programs we talk to describe more families at the door than two years ago, and the causes are a mix of Helene's hit to the local economy, changes to SNAP eligibility, and grocery prices that have climbed by about a third since 2019.

I am not going to argue policy here. I bring it up because it is the backdrop for everything below. The need went up, and the information about where to meet it did not get any better on its own.

What I would have said six months ago

People have started asking me what the long-term vision for FastRoots is. Six months ago I am not sure I could have answered clearly. It has been a long and often frustrating road to build a company around a business model that did not exist yet.

Two weeks ago, with the Community Foundation of Henderson County, we launched the Henderson County Food Finder. Every one of the 43 listings on it has been confirmed in a direct conversation with the people who run it, and the map will keep getting re-verified after launch day. Behind the public map, the Foundation and the county's food funders work from the same verified data laid over census-tract demographics, so the next grant conversation starts from what is actually on the ground.

That is the vision, and I can see it now: a verified food resource map for a county or a region, maintained by people who live there, that funders use to put grants where the need is heaviest and that a person facing food insecurity can trust when they show up at the door.

In the two weeks since the launch, several community foundations and food action councils, some in North Carolina and some well outside it, have reached out asking whether their county could have the same thing. Each one describes the same problem in its own local terms: the list is out of date, nobody owns it, and the funders are guessing.

It is not a nationwide map. That would be possible in theory, and it is not what we are building. Every county has its own providers, its own gaps, its own funders and its own people who know where the pantry moved. The work has to be grounded in the community it serves. Two years in, the name we picked at the start turns out to describe the plan.

Why "Roots"

From the beginning, Addi and I wanted grassroots organizations to have the same access to resources as the established ones. Grant funding, financial support, a seat at the table.

Charitable food in most regions runs through the regional food bank, and it has to. The food bank is the industrial-scale distribution system, and with the number of people facing food insecurity going up, we need it moving as much food as it possibly can. Nothing in this post is a critique of food banks.

What that system leaves out is everyone who is not a partner agency. The church running a blessing box. The neighbors keeping a community fridge stocked. The organizations that, for their own reasons, do not partner with the food bank, sometimes over mission, sometimes because they can do more good doing things their own way. In Henderson County, about half of the providers we verified turned out not to be food bank partner agencies. Before the map, most of them were not on anyone's list.

They are on the map now, next to the biggest pantry in the county, with the same verified hours and the same visibility to the funders deciding where the next grant goes. The ecosystem map was not how I expected to keep that early promise, but it is how we kept it.

Back to the lunch boxes

The lunches came back because two groups were feeding the same crew and neither could see the other. Two years later, in one county, everyone is looking at the same picture. The plan is to do it again in the next county, and the one after that, with the people who live there.

If you are a funder wondering what the picture looks like in your county, that is where we start.