Community Development

While many businesses struggled to survive amid the pandemic, Angelic’s Kitchen is growing. Angelic Jenkins, the owner of Angelic’s Kitchen and former HR Director for the DoubleTree Hotel, quit her role at the hotel a few weeks ago. She’s now focused on running her business full-time. Despite the challenges of navigating a global pandemic, Jenkins is overcoming hurdles to open a new location at the Dairy Market–a cafeteria-style food hall featuring other local entrepreneurs on Grady Ave in Charlottesville, Virginia.

When the pandemic hit last spring and everything shut down, many people to include business owners were left in uncertain times. Such was the case with Ronnie Meggison, also known as ‘King Ron’. You see Ronnie had an extremely successful trucking company with a small fleet that was doing import and export deliveries from the ports down in Hampton Roads or the ‘7-5-7’ as it is affectionately known. “COVID shook my trucking company and hauling imports from overseas came to a stop,” said Ronnie.

Charlottesville Tomorrow, in partnership with Vinegar Hill Magazine and In My Humble Opinion Radio Show, has been awarded $23,000 through the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation’s Community Recovery & Catalyst Grant program. The grant will help fund the recently established Charlottesville Inclusive Media project.

Back in April, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Conscious Capitalist Group Foundation, Inc. set out to bring solutions to businesses who were struggling during the pandemic. Rob Gray and Derek Rush put out a clarion call for young people throughout Central Virginia to think of innovative businesses that could be helpful during the pandemic.