What up, Hiking for Hunger fam! It’s been awhile since we’ve done an intro post, so here goes nothing 🙂

Hi, hello there! We are Micah and Keeka Grant-Tomlinson, the creators of the Hiking for Hunger (H4H) project, an initiative which came into fruition at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were both working for MANNA FoodBank in Western North Carolina (WNC), a part of the US that sees higher rates of food insecurity than the national average under normal circumstances. We witnessed firsthand the dramatic increase in need spurred on by the early days of the pandemic and felt driven to find a creative means of further supporting MANNA’s mission of ending hunger in WNC beyond our day jobs.

Thru hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT) had been a dream of ours for a long time, and we had planned to finally make this dream a reality in 2021. Somewhere along the line, we came up with the idea of harnessing our thru hike as a means of fundraising for MANNA. Fast forward to the end of our H4H fundraising campaign on the AT, we had raised just shy of $32,000 for people facing food insecurity in WNC, more than tripling our original goal of $9,000.

We’re thrilled to be bringing Hiking for Hunger back as we prepare to thru hike the Pacific Crest Trail this spring. We’ll go into more detail on our backgrounds, what we’ve been up to during our year+ off from thru hiking, etc… in future posts. Until then, please feel free to ask us questions you’d like answered! 🤗

Happy Trails,

Hero & BAM!