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Get to know Cheryl Mosley, director of Feeding Southwest Virginia's Community Solutions Center, and her love of connecting communities.
Ashley Fellers
Cheryl Mosley
Ask Cheryl Mosley about her typical day, and she can’t help but laugh.
“There’s not really anything that you can call typical here, but we’re used to the typical chaos,” says Mosley, who became the director of Feeding Southwest Virginia’s Community Solutions Center in 2019.
On any given afternoon, you might find her meeting with community leaders, teaching an entrepreneurship class, delivering boxes of food to seniors, or in gloves and apron in the kitchen, showing culinary students how to prepare free meals for local children. “It doesn’t matter what hat you wear–if the community needs you, you just do it,” she says.
The Community Solutions Center has seen many transitions over its lifetime. Once a thriving black-owned, family-run restaurant, years later the building became a location prone to crime. In 2018, the CSC was founded to spark change in Northwest Roanoke and to revitalize the building’s rich history.
Today, the center’s best-known program is probably its meal-production training course, where would-be food service entrepreneurs can learn about running a business, earn their Serv-Safe certification, and gain experience prepping fresh, free meals for the Children’s Meal Program–another program operated out of the CSC. Those meals are then distributed throughout the city, feeding some 200-500 hungry youngsters per day.
The CSC also provides opportunities for volunteers–whether those are underemployed individuals seeking job skills, adults with developmental disabilities seeking life skills, or folks who just want a place to connect and give back.
One such volunteer is David Duncan. Since he was first connected to the CSC through Hope Tree Family Services, he’s helped package hundreds (perhaps thousands!) of burritos, apples and oranges for the Café to Grow food truck, gaining important skills in the process. The best part?
“Helping other people!” he says.
“It’s all of us, pulling together, no matter what your strength or weakness may be,” says Mosley, who has a knack for listening closely to what folks need, then connecting those needs with people excited to meet them–often from right inside the neighborhood. “The people that come to the center for meals or seeking other life solutions tend to become more like members of our family. No matter what happens in their lives, they feel comfortable sharing and know that we will do all we can to help them.”
Mosley’s love of connecting communities through food runs deep.
“My grandma Marsha … she used to bake at the drop of a dime,” she remembers. “She was so welcoming … In my family, her house was the house. We would all come … and she would just cook this God-blessed fried chicken… and everyone was welcome, family or not. I remember my mom [saying,] ‘you can’t have everybody over here!’”
Marsha’s open-door approach is an example Mosley aims to live up to.
“A huge part of how hospitable people say I am, how welcoming people say I am, and the food–I know it’s really rooted [in] my grandmother,” she says. “You just put your heart into it, you put your soul into it and you get around the kitchen table and you do life.”
Before coming to the CSC, Mosley served for a decade as the principal director of a Franklin County school for children with disabilities, then left that role to devote herself full-time to her downtown bakery, Delish! Sweets & Treats. The business was a hit among its customers, but financial pressure eventually forced Mosley to pivot from her brick-and-mortar location to a home-based custom-cakes model, instead. Those hard decisions frequently bear fruit in her current work.
“I’ll be honest; I feel like I have a wealth of knowledge based on what I’ve had to go through,” she says. “When I stand before our students and give them the spiel, I do real talk … Delish! was tough, but worth it! I can now tell folks who want to start their own bakery or business, ‘hey, here’s some things that I went through; you might not want to go down that road, or you might want to try this road instead.’”
It’s one of many ways that Mosley’s past has prepared her for her present. And there’s plenty more work to be done:
“I want to see a thriving city,” she says. “There’s a lot of inequity here in the city, but you’ve got amazing individuals and groups who are overcoming that and coming together and doing what we have to do, in spite of the odds … and I think that’s a beautiful thing.”
The story above is from our May/June 2021 issue. For more stories, subscribe today or view our FREE digital edition. Thank you for supporting local journalism!