Category: Philanthropy

Rep. Holley, Art Pope, and Councilman Weeks at the April 1 Save-A-Lot grand opening On Wednesday, April 1, 2015, Variety Wholesalers CEO Art Pope, joined Variety Wholesalers President Wilson Sawyer to officially open the doors to their newest store venture, a Save-A-Lot grocery store at 1610 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Raleigh. Several local representatives were on hand to mark the occasion including Rep. Yvonne Lewis Holley and Raleigh District Councilman Eugene Weeks.  Holley praised Variety Wholesalers for the social impact the store will have on Raleigh, noting that some issues were beyond politics.  She praised the number of jobs created and the effort Variety Wholesalers made to hire from the community. At the grand opening, two separate $2,000 checks were presented to Inter-Faith Food Shuttle and the Salvation Army on behalf of Variety Wholesalers. The news article below appeared online with the News & Observer on April 1. Save-A-Lot store opens in Southeast Raleigh Kroger left in 2012, leaving residents with few grocery options BY SARAH BARR SBARR@NEWSOBSERVER.COM   A new Southeast Raleigh grocery store aims to fill a need for fresh, affordable food in a neighborhood where residents were left with few grocery options after a Kroger closed two years ago. Save-A-Lot, part of a chain of more than 1,300 discount grocery stories, opened Wednesday in the former Kroger building on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Variety Wholesalers, headed by former state budget director Art Pope, owns the 18,000-square-foot store, along with a Roses store that’s connected to the new grocery. Shoppers toured Save-A-Lot after a grand-opening ceremony Wednesday, searching out deals on fresh produce, meat, dairy and other foods. They found an 8-pound bag of Red Delicious apples for $2.99, a box of elbow macaroni for 87 cents, a 2-pound pack of boneless pork chops for $6.55 and a gallon of whole milk for $3.75. Lisa Toon, 51, said she’s relieved to see a grocery store return to the shopping center. Since Kroger closed, she’s had to drive past the empty building to get to the nearest grocery store and hasn’t been able to find groceries as cheaply as she would like. “It will make life a whole lot easier,” she said as she and her husband, Ledell, pushed a cart with chicken, paper towels and eggs. In late 2012, Kroger announced it would pull out of the location because of declining sales figures. Residents and elected officials said the move was a major loss and worried about how it would affect the neighborhood. They especially had concerns about those without cars who have had to rely on several buses to get to the nearest full-service grocery stores about a mile away. Of the 4,000 households within a mile of the store, 25 percent earn less than $15,000 a year and more than half earn less than $35,000. The median household income in Wake County is about $66,000, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Variety Wholesalers bought the Kroger building last summer for $2.57 million, prompting public criticism from some community leaders who dislike Pope’s support for conservative causes. At the store’s opening, Rep. Yvonne Lewis Holley, a Wake County Democrat, said the issue is not a political one. “Guess what? When you’re hungry you don’t say are you a Democrat or a Republican,” she said. “Some issues exceed politics.” In the state legislature, Holley has pushed to bring attention to the issue of “food deserts,” communities where families don’t have easy access to fresh, healthy and affordable food. She said the new store also is important for the economic development it could help spur in the area by adding jobs and anchoring the shopping center. The Save-A-Lot employs 27 people, and the Roses employs 70. Variety Wholesalers officials have said the pairing of the Roses with a Save-A-Lot should encourage residents to make the trip to the shopping center, heading off the problems Kroger had in the location. Customer Sharon Paige, 60, showed up to shop for groceries before the ribbon across the front of the building was even cut. She’s looking forward to buying household items at Roses, then heading next door to Save-A-Lot. “You can do everything in one step,” said Paige, who said she may even walk to the store from her home in Chavis Heights.    

On December 23, 2014,  News & Observer columnist Barry Saunders wrote about Art Pope, the philanthropist, and his work with the Pope Foundation.  The column appears below and can be read online at: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/12/22/4423459/saunders-the-giving-side-of-art.html?sp=/99/102/110/117/197/. Saunders: The giving side of Art Pope BY BARRY SAUNDERS Ah, man. It would be the social event of the season – nay, of the millennium – but alas, it’ll never happen, cap’n. They wouldn’t even have to pay me to cover a wang dang doodle attended by people from all of the groups that get money from the J.W. Pope Foundation: just being there and seeing those in tuxes and tatters mingling would be payment a’plenty. Since 1986, the beau monde and thedemimonde – that’s the high-class swells who dine at white-linen establishments and the struggling soup-kitchen mavens who do what they have to to survive – have benefited from the altruistic contributions of the organization headed by Art Pope. Yes, that Art Pope. Pope, the current chairman and president of the Pope Foundation and Variety Wholesalers Inc., is the most polarizing person in state politics – and he’s not even in politics. Depending upon on which side of the aisle one stands, Pope is a selfless patriot or a reactionary zealot who at best is indifferent to the poor. While serving as Gov. Pat McCrory’s budget director, Pope was thought by many to be the state’s real chief executive, earning the sobriquet “Pope Art” and “knight of the right.” I always doubted that Pope was controlling state government, because much of it has been so dysfunctional that it would be hard to find Pope’s imprint on it. It’s not hard to find it on Step Up Ministry, though. Steve Swayne, CEO of the nonprofit jobs and life skills training program, said the $25,000 his organization received from the Pope Foundation “will help us place 30 people in jobs. … Many of these people have been in the criminal justice system, over half of them have been homeless.” It has placed 554 in jobs this year. Whenever I’ve sought comments from Pope in the past, it was about some political move that had infuriated half of the populace and delighted others. That’s why when I called and left a message last week, I hurried up and let his office know that I come in peace, in recognition of the Christmas season. Philanthropic father When I reached him by phone, he explained that his father, John W. Pope, had long been philanthropic. “My parents gave directly … and the company gave to local charities in the areas where we had employees. … When I joined the family business in 1986, he wanted to channel the family and company charitable giving through a foundation. One of the first tasks he assigned to me was to form this Pope Foundation.” Pope said the group’s local humanitarian giving is centered in Wake, Vance and Harnett counties. “That’s where our family is from, where the company is from, where most of our employees are. Mainly, it’s a geographic criteria. … We have a board of directors – originally, it was just me sitting down with my father reviewing the grant requests. In the last six or seven years, we’ve gotten more professional, a staff with grant officers – not many: we only have two people on the payroll. I’m not on the payroll, by the way. “They review and recommend the grantees, and we present it to the board of directors and the board approves it,” he said. Just reading the list of the groups that received almost $2 million in December is enough to set the mind a-racing at the thought of seeing them all coming together. In addition to Step Up Ministry, groups as disparate as the N.C. Symphony, N.C. Museum of Art, Helping Horse Therapeutic Riding Program, Carolina Ballet, Shepherd’s Table Soup Kitchen, Safe Haven for Cats, and the Food Banks of Central and Eastern North Carolina all received grants from the foundation. Pope, in a news release, said, “The old ‘give a man a fish’ parable is that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but that if you teach a man how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. We believe in doing both.” That’s cool, but too many people don’t consider that, for a man to fish, he at least needs a pole. And a lake.      

In a December 17, 2014, Indy Week news article, author Sam DeGrave published several false facts, generating inaccurate assumptions about Art Pope and the John William Pope Foundation’s involvement with the University of North Carolina Board of Governors in North Carolina.  To read the original Indy Week article, “Is the long reach of Art Pope driving the UNC Board of Governors’ Review,” visit their website. On December 23, 2014, the Indy Week published Pope’s letter to the editor that corrected the false facts.  The letter in its entirety can be read below and on their website. Pope responds  If the INDY is going to pass off a college student’s opinion piece as a news feature, (“Politics of Scrutiny” Dec. 17), one would think that getting basic facts correct would still be a requirement. Contrary to Mr. DeGrave’s reporting, I have never been chairman of the Civitas Institute or directed its day-to-day operations—though I have previously served on its board of directors. The article is also wrong when it stated that the Pope Foundation, of which I am the Chairman, has a “long history of animosity toward the UNC System,” and called for a review of UNC centers “as a cost cutting measure.” To the contrary, as a grant-making foundation, the Pope Foundation has given over $5 Million to support UNC, with a grant payment this month for $400,000 to support the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. If the INDY had bothered to ask me about the article’s main point, I would have answered that rather than “driving” the UNC Board of Governors review, I did not even know about the BOG’s interviews of the selected UNC centers until after they happened, and I read about it in a real newspaper. Interestingly, Mr. DeGrave himself reported, “half of these centers could be viewed as counter to the agenda of the Republican-controlled state legislature.” Instead of trusting Mr. DeGrave’s reporting (given his failure to share the facts), I personally would rely on the UNC Board of Governors’ review to determine if these centers have productive academic missions, rather than a partisan agenda in support of or in opposition to either the Democratic or Republican Party’s legislative agendas. But since I was not asked for an interview, even though the INDY prominently featured my name in the headline and story, the real question to ask the Indy is if this story was simply sloppy journalism by a student intern or deliberate propaganda? Art Pope      

David W. Riggs, Executive Vice President of the John William Pope Foundation, made this statement in response to a recent documentary by Bill Moyers: Bill Moyers, through Moyers & Company, recently released a documentary titled “State of Conflict: North Carolina.” Broadcast through the PBS network on Jan. 3, the one-hour program falsely portrayed the charitable work of the John William Pope Foundation and of our Chairman and President, Art Pope. “State of Conflict: North Carolina” repeated the false claim that Art Pope and the Pope Foundation “bought” the state of North Carolina, mostly through giving to public policy nonprofits that advocate for common sense free-market reforms. Mr. Moyers presented nothing new in his documentary — in fact, he’s late to the party. Many left-wing operatives have hurled similar accusations for years. The claims have never stuck because they are entirely false. But Mr. Moyers doesn’t merely repeat a falsehood. Worse, he conceals the fact that the Pope Foundation is not the largest grantor to public policy groups in North Carolina. While the Pope Foundation gives around $5 million to conservative, free-market organizations in North Carolina each year, that number pales in comparison to the $11 million given annually by left-wing foundations to progressive groups in the Tar Heel State. In 2011 alone, three progressive foundations gave generously to left-of-center, liberal groups in North Carolina: The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation ($9.2 million in grants), the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation ($614,000 in grants), and the A.J. Fletcher Foundation ($968,000 in grants). If North Carolina can indeed be bought, as Mr. Moyers and his allies claim, then shouldn’t it go to the highest bidder, the side that spent the most money? Click here to read the rest.

The Daily Dispatch, based out of Henderson, N.C., yesterday reported on the Pope Foundation’s $35,000 in grants to food pantries in Vance County. The grants were part of a larger $185,000 given by the Pope Foundation in October to humanitarian charities.  LifeLine Outreach Inc., a nonprofit based in Vance County that alleviates homelessness and assists women and children in crisis. (Photo credit: Daily Dispatch) The Dispatch reported: Local non-profits and faith-based organizations took a hit when the federal government closed for 16 days. The John William Pope Foundation made its yearly donations to Vance County charities a few months early this year to help offset the impact of the shutdown. “We heard on the ground that the federal government shutdown was having an effect on these charities doing this humanitarian work and what we decided to do was to expedite our end of the year funding to cover the shortfall caused by the shutdown,” said David Riggs of the Pope Foundation. The foundation is a private family foundation focused on humanitarian charities in Wake and Vance counties. The foundation donated $5,000 to Area Christians Together in Service, $10,000 to Life Line Outreach Inc. and $20,000 to the United Way of Vance County. Twanna Jones, executive director of ACTS, said her organization has not received a Pope Foundation grant in the past. “They heard about the great work that we were doing in the Vance County community,” Jones said. ACTS provides a daily soup kitchen on weekdays, a food pantry, backpack buddies, and Meals on Wheels for the disabled and elderly. Jones has plans to expand her operation with a mobile feeding program that supplies meals to all areas of need. She said the grant money would help with the expansion as well as day-to-day operations. “My goal is to have a seven-day a week soup kitchen that feeds twice a day,” Jones said. For the first time this year, ACTS will serve lunch on Thanksgiving Day from 10 a.m. to noon. (Note: A subscription is needed to view the entire article, but there is no cost.)