THE SPACE BETWEEN
Community Insecurity: How a café in downtown Raleigh feeds our hunger for human connection
By Amanda Lamb
“I just want to be the best mother, sister, daughter, friend, and person I can be,” says the woman we’ll call Cassandra, with tears in her eyes.
I nodded, feeling a stinging sensation in my own eyes. Cassandra was coming out of addiction and had just seen her children for the first time in weeks the prior day. As a mother myself, I couldn’t imagine the loss she had experienced and what she needed to overcome to get her life back on track.
Several years ago, I never would have imagined having this kind of powerful interaction with a stranger. Now, it’s one of the things I look forward to most when I volunteer each week at A Place at the Table (APATT), the pay-what-you-can café in downtown Raleigh.
When my husband and I first moved from Cary to Raleigh in March 2021, the world was still slowly crawling out of the pandemic. My longtime job as a local television news reporter was still mostly virtual. We worked in our cars and over Zoom. I was craving real human connection. So I decided I would volunteer in my new neighborhood.
APATT fit the bill. It’s nearby, and the organization focuses on helping people who are in dire need of one of the most basic necessities—food. I was immediately drawn to this mission. Our clientele volunteer for one hour in exchange for their meals. Other customers who pay full price for the excellent food (it’s consistently rated online as one of the best breakfast spots in Raleigh) help pay for someone else’s meal. It’s a simple but beautiful equation that founder Maggie Kane says not only tackles food insecurity, but also helps address what she calls “community insecurity.”
In other words, everyone is hungry for genuine human connection—even those going through some of the darkest moments in their lives.
In between the intensity that has become the hallmark of the modern world, there are moments when we have genuine connections with other people; people in our family, friends, colleagues, strangers. And for most of us, these moments stand out in our day because human connection is something we need as much as we need air to breathe.
Never before in modern history have we been so disconnected. Sure, we text, email, communicate online and on social media. But are these real connections? Are they fulfilling? I would argue that digital communication has replaced in-person communication on a large scale to the point that many people are feeling more isolated than ever. Whether it’s teenagers retreating to their bedrooms to play video games for hours, online daters who never take it offline, or friends who forgo phone calls for a quick text here and there, the real meaning of “face time” is vanishing. I’m afraid that we’re not only disconnected, but that we’re losing our ability to genuinely connect in person. We’ve created so much space between ourselves and others that sometimes it feels impossible to return to a time when face-to-face interaction was all there was.
In this column, I’ll focus on stories about people that are shrinking the space between us—people who have consciously decided to meaningfully connect in a digital age. It takes effort, but it’s worth it. I promise.
As Cassandra was leaving for the day, I told her she was on the right track and that I would be rooting for her. She surprised me by leaning in for a hug. This time I smiled through the tears stinging my eyes.
Amanda Lamb is an award-winning journalist, author, and podcast host best known for her decades covering crime and courts in North Carolina. A longtime reporter at WRAL-TV, she has written 13 books and now focuses on storytelling through podcasts, public speaking, and her media company, Stage Might Communications. Follow her at facebook.com/stagemight or visit alambauthor.com.
