2025 Impact Report
2025 Impact Reflection: Growing Community, Sharing Abundance
Asheville Poverty Initiative (API) entered its ninth year with gratitude, resilience, and a renewed commitment to building community across lines of difference. While this year brought its share of challenges, our mission has remained constant: to create spaces of belonging and abundance, and to offer educational opportunities that center the voices and stories of those with lived experience of poverty.
At 12 Baskets Café, community continues to flourish. Each week, we share hundreds of recovered meals around tables where everyone belongs. The café’s free store and communal lunches have remained a cornerstone of connection, while art, music, and writing groups add joy and creativity to the space. Our writing collective, the Moonlight Cheese Alliance, launched the first issue of The Intersection, a community-created street newspaper offering participants an opportunity to earn income and share their stories with the broader public.
Our Realities of Poverty Education Program continues to impact and inform. This year, we welcomed classes from Warren Wilson College, UNC Asheville, and Francine Delany New School, strengthening our partnerships in education. The program also expanded into advocacy—speaking before Asheville City Council to propose compassionate, community-centered alternatives to anti-panhandling ordinances and other policies that impact our unhoused neighbors.
We remain deeply thankful for our volunteers and food partners, whose daily acts of generosity sustain our work. From the individuals who serve meals and tend the garden to local restaurants and grocers who share their surplus, every contribution helps us model a world rooted in abundance rather than scarcity.
Through storms, uncertainty, and change, API has remained a space of stability and hope. This year reaffirmed what we already know: when we come together, we can face any challenge with compassion and creativity.
As we close out the year, we invite you to stay connected—join us for a meal, participate in a poverty walk, or contribute to our end-of-year Give Local campaign. Your support helps us keep the doors open, the food shared, and the conversation going.
Thank you for being part of this community. Together, we continue to imagine and live into a world where everyone has enough and everyone belongs.
Learn more, volunteer, or donate at www.ashevillepovertyinitiative.org.
