New Beacon Ridge Food Pantry Opens to Meet Residents’ Needs

Southeast Raleigh Promise is excited to celebrate the opening of a new pantry at Beacon Ridge, a resource for emergency food and personal care items exclusively for residents of the apartment community that helps anchor our Beacon Site campus along Rock Quarry Road.

The Beacon Ridge Pantry grew from something simple, yet important: residents coming together to set community priorities by sharing what they need – and seeing those needs turned into action.

Through outreach to residents, Southeast Raleigh Promise Resident Services Coordinator Mikalyla Cunningham heard firsthand about the need for more access to food resources. To respond to that feedback, Mikalyla partnered with DHIC, the housing partner on the Beacon Campus and their property management team from CMC to take the pantry from an idea to its opening in late August.

Beacon Ridge Apartments were developed by DHIC in 2020. It includes 120 affordable rental apartment homes. About 260 residents live at Beacon Ridge, with more than 100 children under the age of 18.

The pantry is stocked with emergency frozen and non-perishable food, as well as toiletries and other personal care items. Located in the community’s main building, the pantry is an additional nutrition resource offered on the Beacon Site campus, which is also home to a community garden that connects residents to healthy food and nutritional support.

The pantry will be open weekly for two hours on Wednesday afternoons and Thursday evenings.

Launching the Beacon Ridge Pantry was also made possible through support from the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina, which provided funding and emergency food boxes to help establish this important community resource.

The pantry aligns with Southeast Raleigh Promise’s commitment to Health & Community Wellness and encourages a broader understanding that community wellness means more than access to healthcare. It also means having enough food to put on the table, greater access to healthy options, resources for daily living, and the opportunity to connect to each other – and be heard – when something else could work better or make life easier.

At Beacon Ridge, resident voices helped identify a need. Community partnership helped make a solution possible. And today, residents have another resource right where they live.

This is how we are Building Our Community Together!