A Free In-School Grocery Store At An Atlanta School Is Tackling Child Hunger

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Rapper Gunna and Goodr CEO Jasmine Crowe stop by the Goodr grocery store, at the Atlanta middle school he formerly attended. Jasmine Crowe hide caption

Rapper Gunna and Goodr CEO Jasmine Crowe stop by the Goodr grocery store, at the Atlanta middle school he formerly attended.

In America, around 17 million children are battling hunger. An entrepreneur has teamed with rap star Gunna to open a free grocery store inside his old middle school in Georgia to try to begin to change that.

Social entrepreneur Jasmine Crowe knows a thing or two about getting creative in the pursuit of giving back. As CEO of Goodr, a startup dedicated to eliminating food waste, her bread and butter has been helping those who need it most.

It has always been a dream of hers to open brick-and-mortar locations to do just that, Crowe said in an interview with NPR. Partnering with Gunna, whom she and her company have worked with for years on charitable efforts, helped turned that dream into a reality for the students and families at Ronald McNair Middle School in Atlanta.

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The store, called Gunna's Drip Closet And Goodr Grocery Store, has an array of foods, household items, toiletries, and even clothes and shoes for students and their families.

"The principal describes it as like a mini Walmart," Crowe said.

The biggest difference, of course, is that everything is absolutely free. Stock is replenished weekly, and there are vegan options as well as fresh produce. Also present are plenty of easy and quick options, which were chosen for a very specific reason.

"We were really conscious of making sure that we were providing items that the kids could make themselves because the principal let us know that a lot of these kids, when they leave school, they are essentially adults that are making the meals," Crowe explained. "They're doing everything for their household."

Parents can come shop after dropping off their children for school, and they even have the option of using an app, created exclusively for the school, to reserve a shopping time slot or request items.

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Goodr also gifted every student a reusable shopping bag, not just to avoid waste, but also to provide students with the option to shop anonymously. Since every student has a bag to use for anything at any time, there's no real way to know if a student has gone shopping at the Goodr store, Crowe explained on Twitter.

For some parents, whose children now have the option of bringing home dinner for the entire family, it's been a dream come true, Crowe told NPR.

"I know we've received tons of messages from parents that are just saying, 'You know what? You don't know how much you just saved my life,' because now these kids can literally say, 'Mom, I'll bring dinner home.' ...[With so many parents earning minimum wage] sometimes they're working two and three jobs and there are little kids at the house," she said. "So it is really good to be able to have that there."

When Gunna approached Goodr about ways to help out his community during the back-to-school season, Crowe saw an opportunity to give back in a way that would have a more lasting effect than handing out school supplies, she said.

"I just wanted us to do something that would last and just be more sustainable and that we can continue to build upon," she said.