Summer in the North Carolina Sandhills is winding down: the pine straw is dry, the school buses are back on the two-lane roads, and in Moore County a small nonprofit is counting. Not dollars, exactly. People.
United Way of Moore County is in the final stretch of a summer campaign called "250 Neighbors for 250 Years," which asks 250 individual county residents to give whatever they can, together adding up to $25,000 by Labor Day. The Sandhills Sentinel reported on the push earlier this month, and the deadline now sits about two weeks away.
The number is not a coincidence. It mirrors the United States' 250th anniversary, marked this year, and organizers say the echo is the entire point of the thing.
Small gifts, on purpose
"For two and a half centuries, this country has been built by neighbors," Linda Pearson, president of United Way of Moore County, said in a news release quoted by the Sentinel. "People who showed up, pitched in, and took care of each other when it mattered most."
What makes the campaign unusual is the deliberate math. Most fundraising drives lean on a handful of large checks. This one is built the other way around: 250 separate people, no required donation amount, every gift counting equally toward the donor tally. Organizers say they are especially trying to reach first-time givers and lapsed ones — residents who have never given directly to the local United Way, or who have not given in roughly the last year and a half.
Money raised is not earmarked for a single program. It flows into the organization's three focus areas — education, health and financial stability — which Pearson has said is the flexible part that matters, because it lets the group respond to whatever the county actually needs rather than a single line item.
Moore County sits west of Fort Bragg, a stretch of roughly 100,000 people spread across Southern Pines, Pinehurst, Aberdeen, Robbins and a scatter of smaller communities. United Way of Moore County, based in Southern Pines, was formed in 1968 and is among the county's longest-running nonprofits; over the decades it has funneled grants to local partner agencies including groups like Meals on Wheels of the Sandhills, the Sandhills/Moore Coalition for Human Care and the Northern Moore Family Resource Center, according to past coverage and public grant records.
A fire truck, and then the real work
The summer drive is a warm-up. It leads into the organization's 2026 campaign kickoff on Sept. 2, an event anchored by a fire truck pull staged with the Southern Pines Fire Department — teams of neighbors hauling several tons of red steel down a stretch of pavement, which is about as literal a metaphor for community fundraising as anyone is likely to stage.
"Summer is almost over," Andrea Burton, chairman of the United Way board, said in the release. "The need is not."
Why it matters: $25,000 will not fix anything by itself, and nobody involved is pretending otherwise. But a campaign that measures success in donors rather than dollars is making a quieter argument — that in a semiquincentennial year full of parades and fireworks and grand national retrospectives, one honest way to mark 250 years is to hand a small amount of money to the people who feed, tutor and house the family three streets over.
Donations can be made online through unitedwaymoore.com or by check mailed to the organization's Southern Pines post office box. As of the Sentinel's report, the counting was still going. Two hundred and fifty is a reachable number in a county this size — it is roughly one household in every few hundred, deciding that this year, they would be one of the 250.
