“To Everything There Is a Season”
“To Everything There Is a Season”
If you know me, you know I’m not much for quoting Bible verses. I’m grateful for the Bible’s endless wisdom and guidance, but I just don’t know my Bible like that, though I spent many Sundays in church growing up in Alabama.
I made it through years of Sunday School lessons, mission trips, church camps, and Vacation Bible Schools, surely causing deep stress to my chaperones and volunteer teachers with my endless energy, talking, questions, and disruptions. However, my mom will be grateful that at least some of the Bible’s great teachings have stuck with me and I’m able to call on them now, all these years later.
Today’s update is about our recent schedule shift at 12 Baskets. After many months of weekend service, we’ve gone back to the weekday schedule we’ve had for years.
Currently, we’re operating at 12 Baskets Cafe on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. We open for coffee, restrooms, and conversations at 10 am. Lunch is served from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. We’re opening our free store each of these days during lunch hours, and we put the list out to sign up for that service each day at 10:30 am.
Ecclesiastes 3 reminds us that “To everything there is a season.” As the air gets a bit crisper, we trim back the decaying sunflowers in the garden, and we move from summer to fall, the season for our team at the Cafe is now one of slowing down, gathering strength, and working on improving the experience we offer at 12 Baskets in various ways.
The context:
After the devastation of Helene, many of us descended on 12 Baskets, even though we had no power, water, and many of us had no cell service. People just showed up, found something to do, and started distributing food, information, and resources. Each day, so many of you reading this just woke up and found your way there, willing to help. Over those weeks, we became a hub for information, distributing potable water, setting up portable restrooms, serving a lot of food, and, most importantly, remaining a place where people could come and connect.
In January 2025, we committed to keeping the extended schedule and serving on the weekends. Staff and volunteers kept this going all the way up to last Saturday, serving many thousands of meals and allowing the space to be open more. The increased access to our garden, water, restrooms, meals, and resources was an invaluable asset to many neighbors in our community. It allowed us to meet many new people who had been unable to join us during the weekday meals.
The numbers are significant. We went from rescuing around 10,000 pounds of food each month before the storm to over 16,000 pounds monthly. Pre-Helene 2024, we were doing around 550 meals a week. Post-Helene 2025, we were double that…over 1,100 weekly (and over 250 grocery bags and boxes weekly in the free store).
That’s great, and it was necessary in response to the unique challenges post-Helene, but our mission is not centered around distributing food. At our core and at our best, we’re about bringing people together, building and maintaining relationships, reducing fear, and breaking down stereotypes.
Later in Ecclesiastes 3, the speaker claims there is “a time to break down, and a time to build up.”
While there were many benefits to our “built-up” schedule, there were some costs. Our staff extended their hours, we put added strain on our small cafe space and grounds, we had more food to pick up, more volunteers to coordinate, additional staff to hire, money to raise, more emergency plumbing calls (!), etc.
Importantly, we also faced a challenge in our immediate neighborhood that we didn’t foresee when we extended our schedule. In the months after Helene, other food justice resources stopped offering weekend food, and city officials continued their determined efforts to push our unsheltered neighbors out of downtown. Simultaneously, other helpful social justice and anti-poverty organizations and programs surfaced across the street from us, offering essential resources. Neighboring residents and businesses, while continually supportive and understanding of our work, began to regularly express frustration and concerns with what they viewed as the negative impacts of our extended schedule.
We responded with increased neighborhood presence before and after cafe hours, meetings with city officials, community meetings led by our friends at Trinity and Safe Shelter, West Asheville business association meetings, State Street Neighborhood Association, conversations with Asheville Police, Community Paramedics, Asheville Fire, Continuum of Care, and others. We also staffed a two-week community canvass effort, initiated by our friends at Deep Time Coffee, which found us on the front porches of dozens of neighbors and businesses, engaging in conversations about the impact they had experienced, exchanging ideas, and building relationships. We had many conversations with our patrons, board members, staff, and allies.
After much thought and deliberation, we decided that now was “a time to break down,” and bring our schedule back to where it had been for years before Helene, to recover our strength, send more support and capacity toward improving our systems, and honor some of the concerns expressed by our neighbors.
Of course, 12 Baskets didn’t cause the poverty, substance use disorder, untreated mental illness, or homelessness that impact our streets and neighborhoods. These are byproducts of a society that prioritizes relentless economic growth for a few over the basic needs of the many. There are over 30,000 people in Buncombe County today experiencing poverty and food insecurity. 30,000. We fail to fund our schools fully. We suffer under a broken health care system. We have long wait lists at our shelters. We don’t have a single 24/7 public bathroom in West Asheville, and only one downtown. We’ve spent decades prioritizing tourism over infrastructure, focusing more on hotel occupancy rates than on poverty rates.
We need more access to food and shelter and water and restrooms, not less, so this has been a difficult decision for us. As much as we want to do all the things to address the many needs in Asheville/Buncombe, we also realize we have to hold our small piece of the collective rope, our own piece in this struggle, with quality, intention, love, and joy.
Our pieces, right now, are poverty education and community-building at the cafe. We do it well, but we want to do it even better. Moving forward, we’re excited to keep the staff we hired for weekends to bolster our weekday efforts. This will allow us to increase our capacity and daily cleaning efforts at 12 Baskets. It will enable us to commit more support outside of the cafe during days we’re open to be a resource on neighboring sidewalks, in the garden, and out front. It enables us to support more neighbors with various needs and to liaise with our numerous community programs that visit and offer services. Importantly, it allows us to be at 12 Baskets on the days we’re open with more intention, energy, and support. We’re often now doing over 220 meals in two hours during a “normal” day at the Cafe, as well as 60-70 free store visits. We need all the help we can get!!
API is now in its ninth year doing this work. We want to make sure we’re here for nine more years, and beyond. We also know social justice work is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s time to adjust our pace, to prevent burnout, to support our neighbors as they have supported us, and to keep spirits high.
These days, I spend more time in the Tao Te Ching than in the Bible, but the great faiths share profound and universal truths.
Chapter 29 in the Tao Te Ching reads:
“There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.” (Stephen Mitchell translation, 1988)
We want every day at 12 Baskets to be special, powerful, inclusive, and transformative.
We are so proud that our community came together to support our extended schedule for so long. Thank you for that difficult, tiring, rewarding, and necessary work.
Now, we’re ready to be “behind” and “at rest” (at least for a couple of days each week!), regroup, catch our breath, hold our piece of this work with spirit and love, and help Asheville become stronger through conversation, connection, and community—one meal at a time.
