Someone from FastRoots called
You do the work. We help neighbors find you.
If you run a food pantry, community meal, church food closet, mobile market, or any food assistance effort in your community, this page is for you.
We keep a verified, living map of food resources in your county, so neighbors can find you, and so funders can see the need you’re actually meeting. The person who contacted you is a paid steward who lives in your community, and their job is to get your information right and keep it right.
Being listed and verified never costs you anything.
What you get, free, always
Your listing on the public map
Accurate hours, location, services, and access requirements, so a neighbor looking for food actually finds you.
The county-level need picture
The demographic overlays and trends for your county, free to use in your own grant applications and donor conversations.
Control of your own listing
Be visible to everyone, visible only to your county’s coordinating partners, or not listed at all — and change your mind whenever you want.
The FastRoots Data Covenant
These commitments were shaped by conversations with food pantries and programs across Western North Carolina. They are the terms our work runs on.
Your listing is your call
Directory facts (location, hours, services, how to access them) appear on the public map only as you approve them. Some pantries and programs choose not to be listed publicly: some are at capacity, some serve neighbors who value privacy.
You can be visible to everyone, visible only to your county’s coordinating partners, or not listed at all. You can change your choice at any time.
The operational picture, stated plainly
Numbers like how many households you serve are collected in ranges (“100–250 families a month”), never exact counts, and always voluntarily.
The funders who sustain your county’s verification see this picture provider by provider, inside an access-controlled workspace, because directing resources to need requires knowing where capacity and strain actually are. In anything public (reports, articles, the map), your numbers appear only in county-level totals.
This data exists to direct resources toward need: we do not build report cards, rankings, or per-provider performance comparisons, for anyone.
What you tell your steward stays yours
Candid observations (what you’re seeing, what you can’t keep up with, what’s changing) are attributed to you only with your explicit OK. Your steward asks before passing anything along with your name on it. Otherwise it informs county-level trends and nothing else.
Lines we don’t cross
Your information is never sold. What you tell us in confidence stays in confidence.
And we collect as little as possible about the people you serve: neighbors use the public map anonymously, without an account, and we never ask who they are. The community-level need statistics we publish come from public federal data. What pantries, programs, and neighbors share with us is never used to identify anyone or to single out the people being served.
What you get, always free
Your listing, a simple dashboard of your own information, and the county-level need picture (the demographic overlays and trends), free to use in your own grant applications and donor conversations.
Being listed and verified never costs you anything.
“Aren’t you selling our data?”
No. Sponsors pay for the verification work and the assembled county picture: the labor of keeping the map true. No organization’s individual data is ever sold, and the analytics come back to you at no cost.
FastRoots is a social-purpose business. Providers are never charged, sponsors fund a public good, and the map stays public — that is the arrangement, in plain terms.
If something here doesn’t work for your organization, tell your steward. We listen.
Last updated: August 2026
For food hubs & rescue organizations
You already run on data, and you have heard a version of this pitch before. So, directly: sharing flow-level data is always optional, and the covenant above applies to it exactly as written, including that the funders sustaining your county see the operational picture provider by provider, and that nothing public carries your numbers on their own.
What you get in return is routing intelligence — the county need map, showing where recovered food is most likely to be needed and where it currently isn’t reaching. That view is not something you can generate for yourself, because it requires data about everyone else.
If you have been burned by a data-sharing arrangement before, say so plainly to your steward. The covenant above is what we hold ourselves to, and we would rather hear the objection early than discover it after you have signed on.
Want to verify a visit?
If someone contacted you saying they were a FastRoots steward and you want to confirm it before sharing anything, please do. Email us with the name they gave and roughly when they reached out, and we’ll confirm.
info@fastroots.orgCurious about the work itself? Read about becoming a steward.