CHAPEL HILL -- Fall leaves peaking in golds and reds across the Triangle means the trees will soon be empty.
But the porches in Chapel Hill and Carrboro will stay full thanks to a neighborhood food drive that has exploded into a fledgling national phenomenon the past 11 months.
People Offering Relief for Chapel Hill Carrboro Homes is made up of volunteer coordinators who tell their neighbors what five local food pantries need each month. The neighbors put the food donations on their porches, where volunteers pick them up, sort and distribute them.
PORCH now reaches more than 600 households and has expanded from one neighborhood to 53 in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area. A new chapter is starting in Durham.
And thanks to an article inthis month's Redbook magazine, the PORCH model is spreading to porches in seven states.
Linzy Williams is starting a chapter in her neighborhood in Simi Valley, Calif.
"I've always wanted to do something bigger and affect people in a bigger way," she said. "I saw the article in Redbook and decided to jump on it. I figured, 'Why not?' if this is something small I can do."
Williams' first food-pick up is Saturday. She has signed up 30 people so far.
"We've become a well-oiled machine," said Christine Cotton, who founded PORCH with friends Susan Romaine and Debbie Horwitz.
This month's drive for Thanksgiving was the group's biggest, with donors contributing 550 bags of food and cash worth an estimated $12,500.
That was a 70 percent increase over October's donations.
All told, the group has raised $39,000 this year.
Its simplicity makes PORCH so effective, said Allison Worthy, the group's newest neighborhood organizer who lives in the Franklin-Rosemary Historic District in Chapel Hill.
"It's just easy," she said. "... All I have to do is just put my name on a flier."
For Fran Hamer, who helps coordinate donations from 15 houses on Drew Lane in Chapel Hill, participating has been as simple as taking advantage of in-store sales on nonperishable food and buying a bit more during each shopping trip.
"We go to the grocery store all the time, so we just add it to our grocery list," she said.
With the holidays approaching, the demand for pantry donations has risen, Romaine said.
Last week, Romaine dropped off some food for a Burmese family who had been in a refugee camp in India for the past three years. The family's $360 in monthly food stamps had just run out, and the father was eating just rice to keep the rest of the family fed.
"You take that story and multiply it a hundred times," she said. "They're basically just skipping meals. ... That's our job: to relieve this hunger and keep stocking shelves."
Though PORCH has grown, Romaine says she'd like to see it get even bigger.
"My dream would be that we would have an organizer on every single street," she said. "We truly are one can at a time. It's all an act of giving, and all of the porches add up."
