Case Study
Seven audiences. One table. Every message different — every story true.
Triangle Central Kitchen · Durham/Chapel Hill, NC · Director of Marketing & Communications
Triangle Central Kitchen launched in 2025, modeled after DC Central Kitchen — built to transform surplus food into culinary training, community meals, and careers across the Triangle. The mission was clear. The infrastructure was not.
When I joined the founding team, TCK had a founder, a vision, and a name. No brand voice. No website. No events program. No development function. No job description for the communications role — so I wrote one.
What followed was a full-stack communications and development build that I executed as a team of one, reporting directly to the CEO and serving seven distinct audiences with almost nothing in common except the mission.
The Challenge
Seven audiences. Seven completely different value propositions. Seven different reasons to care.
Returning citizens, veterans, and opportunity youth needed to believe this program could change their lives. Philanthropic donors needed to believe their investment would matter at scale. Corporate partners needed a credible ESG story. Volunteers needed to believe their time was worth giving. Restaurant owners needed a reliable workforce pipeline. Farmers and food purveyors needed to see surplus as opportunity rather than waste. And James Beard Award-winning chefs needed to believe TCK was worthy of their name.
Building a single coherent brand that could speak to all seven — without losing specificity, credibility, or voice with any one of them — was the communications architecture problem.
The Approach
The first problem wasn't brand voice or website architecture. It was institutional legibility — making TCK credible enough to be trusted before it had anything to show. No building. No cohort. No meals served. No track record. Just a mission that needed to be believed by seven very different audiences simultaneously, on the basis of vision alone.
Every communications decision was made in service of that problem. The brand voice had to hold across radically different audiences — elevated enough for a philanthropist yet accessible enough for a 19-year-old who'd never worked in a professional kitchen. The website had to structure a complex mission into clear audience pathways. The social content architecture had to build trust before it asked for anything. The events had to make the mission feel real before there was a kitchen to point to.
The work spanned brand, development, events, partnerships, media, and community engagement. I executed it as a team of one, reporting directly to the CEO. Every external touchpoint TCK put into the world came through this engagement.
The Outcome
Three signature events across three distinct audience segments. Chef partnerships with two James Beard Award winners and some of the most recognized culinary names in the Triangle and beyond. A $450K Sysco cornerstone partnership proposal. A $257K+ Y'all Ball fundraising model. A donor base of 30+ individual contributors cultivated from cold. 20+ volunteers recruited and activated. Coverage in the Indy Week, with me quoted by name as Director of Marketing. A guest feature on DC Central Kitchen's own website — national validation of the model TCK was building toward. Participant communications written for a training program that was ready to launch its first cohort.
I built all of it.