The US Times published a feature on the creation of Feeding the Future Project, Inc., the nonprofit I founded to address food insecurity in the communities Capital City Roofing serves. The coverage is appreciated, but there's a longer story behind why the nonprofit exists and how it's structured that's worth telling.

Why I Started Feeding the Future Project

Most nonprofits get started because a founder experienced a problem personally and wanted to fix it. Mine wasn't like that. I started Feeding the Future because I kept running into the same pattern as I grew a roofing company across the Southeast: the neighborhoods where we did the most work often had the highest rates of food insecurity, and nobody in the business community was doing anything meaningful about it at scale.

I could have written checks to existing food banks. I did that for a while. But writing checks felt too passive, and it didn't connect the dots between the business we were building and the communities we were building it in. I wanted something structural — something that tied the company's success to the community's well-being in a way that couldn't be separated.

That's what Feeding the Future Project became: a structural link between every roofing job we complete and tangible support for food banks, school lunch programs, and local food access initiatives in the markets we serve.

How It Actually Works

The model is simple and deliberate:

  • Every roof completed by Capital City Roofing contributes to Feeding the Future Project. It's automatic, not optional, not campaign-dependent.
  • Funds go to local food banks and school lunch programs in the customer's geographic area — not to a central pot that gets redistributed, but directly to the community where the work was done.
  • Every licensee on the Capital City Roofing Licensing Platform operates the same way in their own market.
  • Customers see the impact in their own community, which reinforces the trust they placed in us when they hired us.

That's the whole model. It's not flashy. It's not a billion-dollar initiative. It's a structural commitment that scales as the business scales, and that's exactly the point.

Why It Has to Be Part of the Business Model

The reason this matters — and the reason I keep insisting that community impact be part of the business model, not a side project — comes down to sustainability.

Most corporate philanthropy dies when the company hits a hard quarter. Marketing budgets get cut, community initiatives get shelved, and the companies that were "doing good" last year are quietly not doing good this year. That's because the philanthropy was never structurally integrated. It was a discretionary line item, and discretionary line items get cut first.

Feeding the Future Project is structured so it can't be cut. Every job generates a contribution automatically. There's no separate budget to defend. There's no quarterly decision to make. The business and the community impact rise together, and if one of them ever fell, the other would go with it. That's the accountability we designed into the model on purpose.

Why This Is the Right Thing for Roofing

Roofing is a local business. The customers are homeowners in specific neighborhoods. The crews are made of people who live in those same communities. The insurance adjusters, material suppliers, and inspectors we work with are embedded in the local economy too. Roofing contractors have more reason than most industries to invest in the neighborhoods where they work — and more opportunity to do it well.

If you're a roofing operator reading this and wondering whether this kind of model could work in your own business, the answer is yes. It works at any scale. The only requirement is the commitment to treat community impact as non-negotiable, not conditional on margin. I wrote more about this here: Why Community Impact Must Be Part of Every Business.

What's Next

Feeding the Future Project will continue to grow as Capital City Roofing expands into new markets. Charleston, Nashville, and Texas are already in the pipeline through the licensing platform. Every new market means a new set of local food banks and school programs to support. That's the compounding nature of the model — the more we grow, the more community impact we generate, automatically.

View the Original Source

You can read the full The US Times feature right here.

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