In 2024, NourishedRx found a new partner in RAMS Kitchen, a healthy food services organization in Gastonia, North Carolina. Together, we’ve been supporting Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (Blue Cross NC) members living with diabetes by providing medically tailored meals, groceries, and nutrition counseling to help improve clinical outcomes and enhance quality of life.
RAMS, short for “Really Amazing Meals with Soul,” is more than just a name—it’s a reflection of the spirit in which RAMS Kitchen provides nutritious food and healthy meals to its community. For local residents, RAMS carries an even deeper meaning rooted in their shared history.
Recently, we spoke with Donyel Barber, the Founder and Director of RAMS Kitchen, about their history, mission, and the story behind their name.
A Neighborhood Lacking Access to Healthy Food
Donyel was born and raised in the Highland neighborhood of Gastonia. She left to attend college in Atlanta but returned to be close to her family and serve the community she loves.
Donyel’s passion for helping others is reflected in the wide range of professional roles she’s taken on over the years. She worked as a social worker with the Department of Health and Human Services before becoming the executive director of a homeless shelter for families in need. A few years later, she had the opportunity to work directly on community health with Kintegra Health, a Federally Qualified Health Center. In 2019, she also became the first African American female elected to serve on the Gastonia City Council.
As a community leader and health advocate who lived in Highland most of her life, Donyel was able to help residents lift their voices and raise their concerns. Over and over, she heard that the most important challenge many faced was accessing healthy and affordable food.
Donyel was very familiar with that problem. From the early 1900s, the Highland neighborhood had been home to many Black families who ran their own businesses, grocery stores, restaurants, community centers, churches, and schools. But as that prosperity waned, businesses closed, leaving only a single grocery store for the entire community. Even that store had shuttered before Donyel was born. Growing up, her mother didn’t have a driver’s license, so her mother had to rely on her older siblings and community transportation to go to a grocery store in another part of the city. Many in the community relied upon a man who sold fresh vegetables out of the back of his truck to come through the neighborhood.
By the time Donyel started working for Kintegra Health, there were only a few convenience stores and a Showmars restaurant chain on the other side of the highway for the nearly 6,000 residents. Knowing this was not nearly enough to sustain a healthy community, Donyel set to work conducting focus groups, administering surveys, and collecting data to measure the impact of the community’s food access challenge.
That research clearly showed major health disparities in the Highland community compared to the rest of the city, including significantly higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. This helped Donyel build the business case for a new service to provide healthy food.
Kintegra was immediately supportive when Donyel suggested developing an innovative food program. That kind of “out of the box” thinking was typical of Kintegra and its approach to community health. With their backing, Donyel designed a program and tapped people in the community who worked in food services to join her new team.
In 2021, she launched RAMS Kitchen at Third Street Presbyterian Church—a revered institution that has been serving the local Black community since 1888.
A New Center for the Community
RAMS Kitchen is open to everyone. People even come from across county lines. Currently, the executive chef and team make an average of 200 fresh meals per day, which guests can purchase “grab and go” style and bring home to heat and serve. That food is locally sourced as much as possible from community gardens and local farmers, but is also supported by national distributors, especially out of season.
Most of the meals are $5, making them more affordable—and much healthier—than buying the highly processed shelf-stable or fast food readily available in the area or traveling outside of Highland to purchase groceries to cook at home. The meals vary every day and include a range of offerings such as baked chicken, grilled salmon, and fresh salads.
“We also have a thriving catering business,” Donyel adds, “and our mobile food unit goes out regularly to different businesses and events.”
Donyel is amazed at how quickly and organically the business has grown and how popular it has become. It’s not just a place where people go to grab a quick bite—it’s a place where people socialize and establish new connections. She jokes, “I tell single women, if you’re looking for a man, hang out at RAMS Kitchen because RAMS Kitchen is a daily source for meals for many single men.”
Raising Awareness of Healthy Eating
An important part of the mission at RAMS Kitchen is to educate people about healthy food and healthy eating habits.
“We’re very intentional about what we serve and how much we serve,” Donyel says. “We educate people on what’s healthy—though we also have cheat days so people know they can reward themselves now and again if they stay on the path of eating clean. Every meal is also appropriately portioned. Some people pushed back on that at the beginning, believing the meals were too small. But that’s helped them learn to adjust their eating habits, and it helps us reduce food waste.”
RAMS Kitchen also does outreach to the community. Staff regularly meet with health educators and community members. “And we also love going into schools, recreational centers, and engaging children at farmers’ markets and farms.”
It’s all part of raising awareness and changing mindsets. “We need to get back to the basics of knowing where our food comes from and how it’s raised and grown,” Donyel says. “We need to help people visualize what a healthy, balanced meal looks like on their plate and to rethink portion sizes and eat more mindfully and really savor their food. It’s through face-to-face conversations that we get that message across.”
The Magic of Food is Health
From the beginning, RAMS Kitchen has aimed to improve the health of the community through food. To that end, the organization is big on collaboration.
“We work with wellness coordinators to prepare specialized menu options tailored to individual needs. And we’ve been piloting delivery programs that support Kintegra Health patients who have chronic health conditions or are unable to cook for themselves.”
That work made RAMS Kitchen a perfect fit when NourishedRx launched a diabetes program with Blue Cross NC.
“Blue Cross NC has been very committed to supporting communities by helping to increase access to fresh, nutritious food,” Donyel emphasizes. “They connected us with NourishedRx to help manage deliveries and make sure members with diabetes in our community get fresh produce and prepared meals.”
Participants get meals delivered on Monday to last them through Thursday and on Thursday to last through the weekend. Those meals are specially prepared for a diabetic diet according to NourishedRx’s guidance. “We put a lot of love into our meals,” Donyel says, “and incorporate healthy herbs, spices, and fresh produce to make them taste great.”
Another benefit is the opportunity for RAMS Kitchen staff to interact with members who might not see anyone else all day. “It’s a chance to engage with them, lay eyes on them, especially those who are homebound,” Donyel says. “And if we observe something, we let the NourishedRx team know.”
The program’s impact has been rewarding. “We can see that people are losing weight in a healthy way and reducing their A1C levels because they now have a partner in supporting them on their health journey.”
And About That Name
Given the success and growth of Kintegra Health and RAMS Kitchen, Donyel sees a future in which that model spreads throughout the state. She also hopes that the partnership with NourishedRx continues to expand so that we can help more people with diabetes recover their health through nutritious food.
“Just like we want to have healthy relationships with each other, we need to have healthy relationships with the food we eat,” Donyel says.
Before our conversation ended, we asked Donyel the story behind the name RAMS Kitchen and why she’d chosen that acronym.
She explained that today, the neighborhood school, the Highland School of Technology, is one of the top magnet schools in the state. Years ago, when Donyel’s mother went there for high school, it was known as Highland High and was still segregated. When Donyel was a girl, she attended Highland when it was a junior high school. In other words, like Kintegra Health, Third Street Presbyterian Church, and RAMS Kitchen, Highland as a school has always been a big part of the local community for many people.
And their mascot is a ram.
“It just seemed right for the name to come from the community we’re serving,” Donyel says.
“And it was a full circle moment for me.”
