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“The food insecurity rate in the Pee Dee is high, and add a natural disaster [Hurricane Florence] on top of that and we have a lot of neighbors in need,” Nicole Echols, donor relations manager for Harvest Hope of the Pee Dee, said in an announcement. “This donation will allow us to continue our mission and help more families across our service area.”

The announcement indicates that the Pee Dee has some of the highest hunger rates in South Carolina, and one in five people suffer from food insecurity, including one in four children.

Echols said that because of the support of organizations such as TD Bank, the food bank is able to continue to serve the state.

“TD is proud to support food banks that are embedded in our communities providing food and resources to people in need,” TD Bank South Carolina Market President David Lominack said. “We are thrilled to partner with organizations like Harvest Hope Food Bank that help to empower our communities and act as an advocate to eliminate food insecurities that many face.”

The donation also supports TD Bank’s commitment to community enrichment through its newly launched Ready Commitment, a platform that encourages inclusivity, economic vitality, environmental well-being and health.

Harvest Hope Food Bank was founded in 1981 by business and faith leaders to provide food for the hungry in the Palmetto State. The food bank currently serves 20 counties in the state from four locations. One of those locations, Harvest Hope of the Pee Dee, is on West Lucas Street near Florence.

From that location, Harvest Hope has served 5,242,828 meals to residents of eight counties. Those eight counties are Florence, Darlington, Dillon, Marlboro, Marion, Chesterfield, Clarendon and Lee.

TD Bank is the United States subsidiary of Toronto-Dominion Bank. The bank currently serves 15 states and Washington, D.C. TD Bank is the seventh-largest bank by total deposits and the eighth largest by total assets under its control. The bank’s charitable foundation was formed in 2002. It has distributed nearly $199 million in donations.

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“It’s extremely exciting for me to be open today,” said Jaime Owle, the store manager. “We’re slower than we’d like to be, because we didn’t open on Friday as scheduled.”

Owle added that before coming to the Pamplico Highway store, he served as a store manager of the Five Points Starbucks. He said he trained the manager to take over the store. He also said he wanted the challenge of opening a new store.

Before working at Starbucks, he served as a meat department manager at a Publix.

“I’m super-excited to be here,” Owle said. “I’m super-excited about the location. Once we get going, I know that we’ll really, really generate some business in this location.”

“You have doctors, you have students,” Bethea said. “Like today, we had bluegrass people and we had cloggers. We had (a) jazz band. All of these people sharing one stage, where in another arena, you might not get all these people in the same building on the same stage.”

Wilson High School student Rebecca Liu spoke Thursday about cultural mindset learning. She said in today’s society, everything is black and white and everyone must choose a side.

“You have to be for this political party or that political party,” Liu said. “Or you have to identify as belonging to one culture or another. There is no gray area. But what if we could compromise? What if we could take the best of both sides rather than having to choose?” Liu was born and raised in Florence. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwan.

In America, Liu said, she is seen as Asian. But when she visits her grandparents in Taiwan, she sticks out as American.

“So who am I? Am I Asian or am I American?” Lieu said in her speech Thursday.

For many second-generation immigrants, creating a new cultural paradigm is their change agent.

“In my everyday life, I experience what I consider the best of both worlds,” Liu said. “I take the best of both cultures around me and use it to create my own personalized culture.”

Lake City Mayor Lovith Anderson Jr. was another one of the Pee Dee-area speakers at TEDx Evans Street. He spoke about how Lake City is now recognized on a world stage due to its change and remaining ageless.

Decades ago, Anderson said, Lake City was an agricultural community and grew crops such as tobacco, cotton, soybeans and green beans. In the early 1900s, Lake City was the “green bean capital of the world,” he said. But people began to leave the city as manufacturing and textile plants left.

Anderson even moved away from Lake City. He later returned, as many other are doing, he said. But in other to get more people into the city, Anderson said, people had to look at Lake City and figure out how they could get it back in shape.