ELON, N.C. - Religion holds a special power that motivates people to improve the world around them.
In the field of public interest and social work, religion is a common theme of leaders’ personas. Homeless shelters, soup kitchens and donation centers are commonly associated with religious organizations, especially during the holiday season. But while those efforts provide short-term relief, there are others, motivated by religion, working toward systemic change in North Carolina.
Keith Bullard leads a march at NC A&T State University on October 28.
The rain poured down on Keith Bullard May 10, 2013. Despite the weather, he remembers the day as beautiful. Bullard was leading his first labor strike against the McDonald’s he worked at. Since that day, he has become an avid part of labor union organizations.
“I saw the strength that speaking up at the job has,” Bullard said.
Growing up in Southfield, Michigan, Bullard was surrounded by labor unions and social organizations. He was raised in a Christian faith, and his pastor played a large part in why he is dedicated to social work.
“When I started going to my church, this was school, and what we did the rest of the week was how we practiced our faith,” Bullard said. “My pastor started taking me to protests.”
He’s proud to say that the only jobs he has had in the past were ones in the service industry, including fast food, security and construction jobs. During his time at these jobs, he would promote unions from the inside to co-workers. His dedication comes from a passion for justice and promoting the collective unity brought about by social organizing.
“The one thing I saw in all of that was community. … The same ones in the community were the same ones on the picket line,” Bullard said.
USSW Leader Keith Bullard stands in front of the A&T Four Statue at NC A&T State University on October 28.
Bullard is the leader of the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), a labor union organization based in Durham. With members from North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, the union seeks to represent all those in the service industry who are, as Bullard said, “screwed over every day”. The union’s big focus recently has been on Waffle House and its underserved employees.
“Everyone has a Waffle House story,” Bullard said. “Some of the most amazing people work there for $2.90 an hour.”
This small wage is allegedly complemented by tips, but Bullard argues otherwise.
When there are no customers, Bullard said, "these employees are cleaning bathrooms for $2.90.” There are no food items on the menu that cost below three dollars.
Daily work at the USSW can be as simple as reading emails or as involved as responding to requests for a strike. Bullard recounted a time when Planet Fitness employees had contacted the union at 7 a.m. asking for them to organize a strike. Later that day, the union's members, dressed in bright red shirts, were there with signs and bullhorns.
“Workers are not just single-issue people. … So we as a union must strive to represent the whole worker,” Bullard said. “When a worker finds their voice at their job, they take that energy to their housing authority meetings … to their city hall demanding safe streets.”
Bullard emphasizes the importance of community in labor organizing, saying that community unionism is a key part of empowering the union’s members to “knock down the forms of Goliath in their lives.”
Sheila Otieno is an assistant professor of religious studies at Elon University. Her research focuses on African and African American religion, online activism and the motivations of social change.
“It doesn’t shock me that somebody says 'my pastor thought I am very justice minded and started taking me along to protests',” Otieno said. “A justice mindset attached to a sacred text, that doesn’t surprise me.”
Otieno explained that religious organizations have always been settings for social work and activist organizing.
“The squabbles at church are the same as what is going on in society right now,” Otieno said. “It’s like a test tube, you’ve kind of grabbed a bunch of people and put them together.”
Otieno argues that the theory behind religion’s role in public interest work comes from its morally-similar community.
“The people that you are around are affected by the same injustices,” Otieno said.
Churches, temples, mosques and other religious settings serve as community spaces for people to voice their concerns. This freedom to express marginalization and oppression leads to activism and thus social work.
“We have a community garden in our church. Why? So that people can have healthy food in a food desert,” Otieno said. “Religious communities find spaces where they fill in the gaps where the government has failed.”
Another governmental gap, like food insecurity, is in caring for those experiencing homelessness. According to a Baylor University study from 2017, 58% of the surveyed cities' homeless shelters were faith-based. North Carolina data shows that, outside of Charlotte and Fayetteville, Asheville has the third highest number of homeless shelters within its metro area at five.
An essential part of a religious community’s desire to improve the public sphere is, as Otieno says, the “comradery with the state of marginalization.” As a community grows, the experiences of those in the community grow more diverse as well.
“The community is what then shifts the tide,” Otieno said. She gave the example of LGBTQ+ acceptance in religious organizations as one such growing shift.
“More and more people know a gay person that wants to get married, someone that has a trans son or a daughter dating a trans man,” Otieno said. “Ideologies now are shifting because of more conversation; the more people are talking about things, the more people are being called to question their own morality.”
“That’s what social change is,” Otieno said.
Phil Bowers stands by the Beverly Hills Community Church, home of Sustainable Alamance, on October 25.
“Mass incarceration is becoming a huge problem among Latino communities but also among Black communities, so therefore, it makes sense to see mass incarceration as an injustice,” Otieno said. “Everybody at my church maybe knows somebody who’s been to jail or is in jail.”
Phil Bowers began Sustainable Alamance in 2008, a program that supports formerly incarcerated people through labor opportunities. People come to the organization to prove they are capable of showing up on time and working hard, and then Sustainable Alamance will vouch for them to partnered employers.
“Will they show up on time, will they take care of the equipment, can they get along with coworkers,” Bowers said. “It’s not so much their offense, it’s about having their head in the game.”
Sustainable Alamance has several businesses under its name including a furniture moving and a lawn care business. Formerly incarcerated people can show their ability to work in a professional setting while also reintroducing them to the working world.
“It may take three months, it may take a year before we refer somebody,” Bowers said. “Nobody is ever turned away, regardless of their offense; we like to say we help everybody from jaywalking to first-degree murder.”
North Carolina is home to 53 prisons, and the state holds about 30,000 people in these facilities. To incarcerate one person in North Carolina, it costs almost $48,000 a year. Sustainable Alamance most often receives people looking for help from Orange Correctional Center in Hillsborough.
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“It is a huge financial benefit for us to restore these men and women, it is less spending on prison and now they’re taking care of their families,” Bowers said.
“I do believe that we are called to deal with injustice,” Bowers said. “In our legal system… with probation, fees and fines, and if you add that people don’t want to hire you because of a criminal record, there has to be an endpoint somewhere.”
“Hope demands justice,” Otieno said. “I can see within my community that I can be better and I can have better.”
Social activism and the actors involved
Social activism is dead and social media killed it, allegedly
The civil rights era of social activism is memorialized by police making arrests, national guard soldiers clashing with students and city-wide marches as far as the eye can see. These demonstrations took months of word-of-mouth planning. Today, social activism happens on our phones almost instantly.
The First Amendment protects the right to demonstrate on the streets, and it is an essential part of American democracy. But, in lieu of social media, many turn to the websites as virtual “sidewalks” to voice their opinions, ignoring the power behind a physical demonstration of disapproval.
According to the Pew Research Center, 31% of Americans say that social media platforms are very effective at raising public awareness, and 27% say that they are very effective at creating and sustaining social movements.
“The fact that we can rally so many people together with just a couple presses of a button, I think [social media] is absolutely necessary if we want to make any impactful change,” says Danielle Kennedy, a March for Our Lives protester and UNC Chapel Hill student.
March for Our Lives is a student-led organization that demands government action against gun violence, and its UNC Chapel Hill division hosted an anti-gun rally in Raleigh to address the recent shooting on UNC’s campus. Social media was a key part of why this rally was able to happen.
Two attendees embrace at the March for Our Lives gun violence demonstration in Raleigh on September 12.
“Social media can be a really good tool to get the word out about something, but for super mainstream topics … it can be very performative,” says Stephanie Caddell, a UNC Chapel Hill student.
A prominent example of social media activism is the #blackouttuesday movement. On June 2, 2020, millions of users across Instagram posted a black square to raise awareness of police brutality and the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.
Critics argue that the online movement provided an excuse for people to not become active in their communities during the wave of protests across America in 2020 against racial bias, instead feeling satisfied that they did their part by posting the square.
“This isn’t about who can perform their wokeness the best,” wrote NBC News writer Noor Noman. “This is about continually seeking out the best, most effective solutions to these systemic problems. ... Posting a black square on Tuesday doesn’t inherently make you a bad ally — but it doesn’t inherently make you a good one, either.”
The Rev. Nelson Johnson speaks to the crowd beside UNC Young Democrats President T.J. White at the March for Our Lives gun violence demonstration in Raleigh on September 12.
“Social media has a place, but in terms of social change, it is a stumbling block,” says Lewis A. Brandon III, a civil rights activist who's been fighting for a better Greensboro for nearly 70 years. “Change comes when you interact, social change comes about because you are interacting with other people.”
“You can’t do that by just sending out emails,” said Brandon.
Three sets of data from public records on social activist demonstrations over time show no pattern of decline over the years that data was provided. In Burlington, public records show a consistent rate of demonstrations in the area. Demonstrations peaked in 2016 with seven, and prominent demonstrations include Alamance Pride and the Crop Walk.
The city of Charlotte collects demonstration data through picketing notices. The largest city in the state also shows a consistent rate of demonstrations resting within the 70 mark. The peak was in 2018 with 126 picketing notices received. Surprisingly, the COVID-19 pandemic did not make 2020 the least socially active year.
Between 2021 and 2023, the City of Durham Public Records office shared that the peak number of demonstrations was 42 in 2021.
The rise of ghost kitchens in Burlington North Carolina
The rise of ghost kitchens in Burlington North Carolina
ELON, N.C. - “I wasn’t expecting to get Applebee’s wings, I was expecting to get this new wings spot called Cosmic Wings and that’s just not what I received,” Ari Fischthal says.
Fischthal is an Elon University junior and DoorDasher. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he worked for DoorDash to make money in his free time. While on one of his deliveries, the location of the pickup confused him.
“[A delivery] brought me to this Mexican restaurant in my neighborhood,” Fischthal says. “I was super confused when I showed up at a Mexican restaurant looking for burgers.”
What had Fischtal in a loop was none other than a ghost kitchen, also referred to as a “virtual kitchen.” A ghost kitchen is a virtual restaurant brand that exists online through food delivery apps and operates at an off-site location from its “parent” company. Common examples include MrBeast Burger, It’s Just Wings – which operates out of Chili’s and Maggiano’s restaurants – and Applebee’s Cosmic Wings.
Ghost kitchens are a growing trend in the American restaurant industry. According to Readwrite, 6 out of 10 Americans choose to order out as opposed to dine-in, and by 2023, the food delivery industry will be worth $24 billion.
According to a QSR Magazine survey of 198 people, although 88.9% of people had heard of DoorDash, only 22% had heard of ghost kitchens. The survey found that the most important factor for respondents was that the food is good.
“Before the 2020 pandemic we were doing, maybe 20% of our business was DoorDash, and then it became over 50% of our business and has stayed that way ever since 2020” says Kyle Bundy, the owner of It’s All Good: Southern Kitchen.
It’s All Good: Southern Kitchen reopened last week at its new location off South Church St. across from Stan’s Plaza. The rapid growth of the business is in large part due to its food delivery practices, including that of a ghost kitchen.
Doggystyle: Premium Wieners + Burgers is the ghost kitchen brand that Bundy runs out of his restaurant. On food delivery apps, customers can see both restaurants as separate businesses, but in reality, the food is coming from the same space.
“We were the first locally developed [ghost kitchen] and the second overall in Burlington.” Bundy says. “We only had to add the hot dog meat and the hot dog buns, and we were able to create a whole new menu.”
Bundy says that during the COVID-19 pandemic, Grubhub promoted the idea of creating new restaurant profiles – as long as the menu is different enough from one’s original – on its app to grow one’s market.
“I think it would be a good idea to disclose where the food is coming from,” Fischthal says.
After discovering that his Cosmic Wings order was truly coming from Applebee’s and not from a new local restaurant, Fischthal became wary of ghost kitchens. His experience raises the question of whether ghost kitchens constitute false marketing.
“I can see how people would think it’s false marketing,” Bundy says. “but just from my perspective. and this is me being from the restaurant industry since I was 18, you know it’s all coming from the same kitchen and all that, so to me the branding doesn’t really matter.”
“I think [ghost kitchens are] a good idea in theory, but the misinformation sometimes can get in the way of that,” Fischthal says.
If you’re ever wondering if the place you are about to order from is a ghost kitchen or virtual brand, look for labeling on the food delivery app you’re using. On DoorDash, Doggystyle: Premium Wieners + Burgers has a large red banner saying that it is a virtual brand.