Partner feeds
Separate scripts gather sites from NC 211, food banks, and related programs across the state.
About Provide
We're on a mission to make nutritious food easier to find for low-income communities across North Carolina, and eventually nationwide.
Our Story
Hi! We're Alan, Matthew, and Sohum; full-stack developers driven by a mission to use technology to help people on the local and global scale. Provide was our answer to increasing food accessibility for low-income families in NC!
“Food is a basic human right; it shouldn’t be a privilege, and everyone deserves to have access to organic and good food.”
Leah Penniman
Methodology
A look behind the scenes at how Provide gathers food-access data, puts it on a map, and shares it with the public.
We pull listings from trusted public sources, clean them into a shared format, and combine them into one list. If a phone number or address is missing, we leave it blank. We never invent a place that isn’t in the source data.
Spreadsheets & PDFs
School meal lists and the NC WIC directory often arrive as spreadsheets or PDFs, so we parse those too.
USDA SNAP
SNAP store data is stored in smaller regional files so the map can load nearby retailers quickly.
Merge
We remove duplicates, keep a trail of where each listing came from, and note what changed when data refreshes.
Searches stay inside North Carolina. We place each site on the map, match it to a county when we can, and let people explore nearby help. Optional layers show transit lines and areas with less grocery access.
Interactive map
The Explorer shows pins, filters, and overlays right in your browser.
Address search
OpenStreetMap powers address and ZIP lookup, limited to North Carolina.
County matching
We check each pin against county boundaries so coverage and location details stay accurate.
Nearby loads & transit
SNAP data loads by area so pages stay fast, and bus routes or stops can appear as an optional layer.
Provide runs as a simple website: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with no heavy app server for the map itself. Forms email our team, and we use light analytics to understand visits.
Simple website
Home, Explorer, and volunteering pages load without a complex build step for visitors.
GitHub
Where we keep the code, the data files, and the path to publishing provide-nc.org.
Form email
Contact, Join Us, and listing forms send messages to the team without a custom email server.
Google Analytics
Basic traffic measurement. See our Privacy Policy for what we collect.
Want to get in touch?
We'd love to hear from you, whether you have questions, feedback, or a data correction.
Contact Us