Once More Through the Wringer: A Conversation with Neil Blackmon About Faith, Failure, Friendship, and Food

Neil Blackmon competed in policy debate for the University of Florida and coached debate at Pace. He is an experienced civil litigator and journalist. In addition to practicing election law, Neil’s social impact work includes faith-based community organizing. Neil sat down with CoLab Debate Executive Director Emily Cordo to discuss how debate prepared him to build a coalition of food pantries collaborating to expand equitable food access and reduce food waste.

EC: How did you get started in debate? 

NB: I moved during high school, which really stinks. My first new friend and I were playing pickup basketball one day, and he said “My debate partner left. It would be great if you came out to join the debate team. You don't have to know anything about it. 
It'll be fine.” 

The social aspects of debate can be a huge draw. Are you still in touch with any of them?

There were four debaters on our team, and three of us went on to debate in college, all at a fairly high level. We were pretty close, and remain close. And our high school coach is still a close friend. That element of debate was irreplaceable. I've gotten more out of my debate friendships than any friendships that I've had in my life. Intellectually, socially, the emotional support, and also the important aspect of friendship where you challenge each other and hold each other accountable. All of those things have been super useful. 


Why is debate so conducive to forming deep bonds? 

The time together is one of the biggest things. Even on sports teams, rarely do we travel overnight with friends. A lot of kids see their friends all week and then they spend most of the weekend with their families. Well, a lot of debaters spend weekends with their debate family.

But I think it's a lot of little things about debate that make it conducive to those friendships. It's not just time under tension. For example, I've never been able to articulate what a stereotypical debater is. Being immersed in a space where you meet people from all sorts of different backgrounds, and you learn about the baseline–common humanity–is really useful. I debated farm migrant workers from Fullerton. I met debaters from Georgia State who went to Atlanta Public Schools, in downtown Atlanta, where there weren't white people. 
I was exposed to a lot of different people and learned that I had a lot more in common with those people than I didn't. 

It helps you forge friendships when you can find areas of agreement. It helped me, for example, when I went up to New York to coach at Pace and I helped in the Urban Debate League. I went to Bedford Styvescent, as a pretty privileged kid from Atlanta, way before gentrification. 
I don't want to say I wasn't afraid of things, because as a result of my privilege and my background I did have preconceived notions of what that would be like, but I understood and realized very quickly how much common humanity I had in any classroom I was in. And you're also not afraid because of debate in itself being a learning activity. Debaters are just innately curious. And so that's helpful because you meet someone new and you have a lot of questions, right? 

Definitely. The vulnerability in showing up ready to learn something, in a competitive environment, has the potential to break down your boundaries and create a space for pretty intense bonding. 


I'm old enough to have debated not long after Louisville started talking about race all the time in debates. This was super interesting to me because that was one of my majors at Florida (before they got rid of it under DeSantis). Eventually I became one of the first fellows at the University of Florida Law School’s Center for Race and Race Relations (which they haven't gotten rid of). I don't think I would have even tried to get that fellowship except for the fact that we kept debating Louisville in elimination rounds. We didn't win all the time and we didn't lose all the time, but every time we had a debate our dialogue with them outside of rounds grew. It wasn't one of these situations where the competitive aspect became overwhelming. 

We had one really interesting and unique debate about racial violence. I learned from one of their debaters about their familial history with Jim Crow, and they learned that my great-grandmother had been at Dachau. So it was this really vulnerable discussion, but through this incredible, vulnerable discussion about familial trauma… I don't want to say we became good friends, but I do think there was mutual understanding. So much so that when I was at school a couple of years later and I was writing a law review article about Hurricane Katrina, and the ways that so many laws made the impact of Hurricane Katrina much worse for people of color, I could call the people from Louisville that I had debated and say, "What do you think about this argument?” and get really healthy feedback. Those are not the types of intimate connections that happen in many other places and spaces. That's what I mean when I say my debate friendships have been the longest but also the most fruitful, in the sense of challenging me to be better. 
And I hope occasionally something that I present helps someone else. 

I appreciate the framing of debate as not just a competitive activity but an opportunity to grow as a person and build relationships and find ground for mutual understanding. 

Yeah of course. Initially when we debated them Louisville was like, “We're trying to abolish the death penalty! Why are you calling us racist?” you know? 
And the evolution from that point to, “You know who I need to call to finish my Katrina law review article?” is pretty neat, but that's an only-in-debate kind of thing, I think. 

How did your debate background help you as an attorney?

As a public defender, I had an understanding of institutional power from debate that was really useful and helped me connect with clients implicitly. A lot of the people that I would defend had legitimate grievances against the system, whether it was the police, the courts, social services, a probation officer, whatever. I could talk to them about that. I was educated about that, and the real world anecdotal evidence kept piling up that proved a lot of the stuff we debated about wasn't just academic, insular, circular firing squad stuff. 
So that was useful. 

Also, I learned how to fail in debate. 

Relatable. 

I was a good debater. I was not a great debater. At national tournaments, we’d get to Octos and know that was going to be the end, I don't want to say we were defeatist, but sometimes you go these rooms at the NDT or wherever thinking “We're going to try really hard, but we're gonna lose this debate, and that's fine.” We had an understanding. I think that helped me a lot emotionally and mentally later. 

I really, really wanted to work in the nonprofit civil rights space. I went to a great law school, a top-30 law school, but a lot of these nonprofit civil rights groups that I tried to join as an attorney wanted a top-14 law school. So I kept getting rejected, despite my resume, and despite what I felt was a high understanding of the issues they were litigating. I was able to handle that with more grace because of debate, and I really think that matters in life. Because sometimes we're going to try really, really hard, and we're not going to reach a goal. That doesn't mean that we're personally inadequate, and it doesn't mean that we don't have something to offer. It doesn't mean that we can't make a difference. That encouraged me to find other ways to try to make an impact. 

How did you respond to that roadblock?

I became an election lawyer. There were only so many times I could go through the emotional wringer of being a finalist for a Southern Poverty Law Center job and not getting hired. It was four times when I finally gave up. 
And I said, “Okay, maybe I'm just not supposed to work at Southern Poverty Law Center, no matter how bad I want to. What are they doing that I think is so interesting?” One thing they were doing was looking at the way that underserved communities don't have access to healthcare, have food deserts, zoning laws, stuff like that. Stuff that I wrote about in law school and stuff that I debated about in college. I realized I can find other groups working on those issues and make my impact that way. 

I love that, because debaters who want to go into public interest law, or any kind of work resisting intractable problems and oppressive systems, must prepare themselves for failure. You have to beat your head against that brick wall for a while before it's going to start breaking down. You have to learn to lose gracefully and keep going.

Yeah, that's really well said. You can lose in court, and your brief could be perfect, and your oral argument could be immaculate, and it's frustrating. More than frustrating. I've had to have very difficult conversations with election law clients recently, like, “Hey, it's time to concede the election. We could go into this courtroom, and we could advance a host of other arguments to extend this. 
But even if we do that, we may lose the recount, and probably will. But more importantly, there's probably going to be institutional harm created by us doing this.” Because there's a certain way to conduct yourself in defeat that matters.

So you do learn how to lose gracefully. You also learn that you can compete at the best level that you're capable of, and sometimes you lose anyway, because there are systems and structures in place that aren't really beyond your control, but by yourself can feel beyond your control. I say they're not beyond your control if you have feet and a heartbeat. 
But yeah, debate, maybe more than anything that I've ever done prepared me for that, not to give up. 

Just like it was okay to lose in the Octos all the time, it’s okay to write great briefs about the Voting Rights Act and lose, because hopefully there will be a day–maybe I'll be retired by then–when the tide shifts, and somebody will stumble on my brief on Westlaw or Lexis, from some case that I lost, and be like, "Wow, these arguments are probably right!" or, “These arguments are close to right, and here's how I can fix them, 'cause I'm smarter than he is.” And that's awesome. 

In addition to your legal work, I’d love to talk about your experience in faith-based community organizing. How did you start? 

My church in Charlotte was a little bit unsure, in the moment after COVID, of what needed to be done. They started a program for the unhoused called Room at the Inn. Every Friday night they opened the church up. The most we could fit was fourteen people and their kids, if they had them. 
And it was like: you now have a place on Friday night where you can come. We'll serve you dinner Friday. We'll serve you breakfast Saturday. We’ll show a movie. We’ll bring in a mental health and wellness counselor that you can see if you need to. Eventually we started bringing in job and vocational counselors, and other essential services that are pretty hard to get. But it was like, we do this four nights a month. What else can we do? 

How did you decide?

I volunteered at Room at the Inn right after my father passed away. My dad died very quickly. 
He was diagnosed with cancer and died within weeks of his diagnosis. It was all very stunning, and to avoid even thinking about it I spent a lot of Friday nights at Room at the Inn. I met a young woman. 
She was around 30 and she had two kids, they were five and three, and she said, “This is the first time I can have a good Friday night with my children, because a lot of times I'm just worried about getting into the shelter on Friday. Here they get to watch a movie, and the only other time that that happens is Thanksgiving. There's always food at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Everybody thinks they're doing something great by cooking a turkey. But we always have turkey. What we need is Thursday night in February.”

And I thought wow. For such a smart person, I felt like such an idiot for not thinking of that. What we were constantly told, especially by the mothers who came to Room at the Inn, was Charlotte's food pantry programs were inadequate. There weren’t enough shelters, and there weren’t enough meals. So I helped them start a program called Loaves and Fishes, after assessing that community need. 
Now Loaves and Fishes is one of the most successful food bank programs in the southeastern United States. It fills such an essential need that people don't even think about it. It's so much more than "Let's cook 100 meals!” That’s how the project started.

Starting with a community needs assessment instead of a preconceived solution is great strategy. How did that idea turn into such a huge program?

The first thing that we had to do was figure out how we could coordinate with various banks to make sure we weren't wasting the food that we already had. Our church was working with one pantry when I started, and now they're coordinating with twenty pantries, which is all of the pantries in the greater Charlotte area. We knew there was already food in twenty pantries, and we knew that the greatest need was actually in Charlotte, while the other pantries ended up having food waste. So what do we do? 

What we needed was volunteers. Then we needed training, to make sure that the food handling was safe, for example. We built this network. It was a little bit like working in the Urban Debate League, honestly. It was like..
. “Hey, who wants to go to this tournament in Queens this weekend?” Let me tell you how many people wanted to do that, in February, right? This was similar. Who wants to drive to Hickory, North Carolina to pick up food so we can distribute it to these moms on Sunday night, so that their kids, who are gonna get free lunch, also have Sunday dinner?

We recruited the first ten loyal volunteers from our church, which is a big church. We built it even bigger by telling them ”If you recruit one person, you've done your job." And so now I think it's thirty a week who go and get foodstuffs and bring them to Charlotte. 

Ok, so you’ve got your community needs assessment, you’ve got your coalition of twenty pantries, and a team of thirty volunteers. How did you put those resources to work?

The last piece was really inventory management. I found market inefficiencies among food pantries, where they weren't sharing their foodstuffs. Or to the extent they were, it was only around holidays, when they had a lot of volunteers, because they were understaffed. Plus, the food that you distribute has to be productive food. You need to distribute protein. You need to distribute fruit (if you have it) and you need to distribute vegetables (which you more likely have because of canned goods). 
Making sure we knew what pantries had what food, making sure that we were getting this stuff to families that needed it, and making sure that we got the right things to the families that needed them, required inventory management. 

We know where the need is, but sometimes the need is very different from family to family. Sometimes it's an elderly couple and they just need to get something in their stomachs. Or sometimes it's a mom who has two kids, and she needs nutrition to supplement what's happening at school. So our church may have to fill in the gaps. 
We may have to buy food, and we hold drives. We’ll say please bring us diapers. Please bring us wipes. 
Please bring us formula. Because even in food pantries, there's the underserved of the underserved. We can get these children chicken and fruit, but maybe there's an infant that really needs formula and is malnourished without it. And a clean baby is a healthy baby, but diapers are ridiculously expensive. Those things are super important. 

Did the project take advantage of any advocacy skills you learned in debate? 

I think it did. I mean, we also needed money, you know? That's part of the advocacy. It's like, this food pantry's great, but we really need to go to Raleigh and ask Governor Cooper and the budget people there to make sure that more money is earmarked to staff these places. We used state funding to create an additional staff position in two instances, both Charlotte-based. 

And sometimes the people who need you the most don't know you exist. I think that's an advocacy piece too. More than 70% of the work that food pantries do is for people who have housing but don't have enough money for food every night. So I think that's an advocacy piece too, just getting that information out there. 

That gets back to the issue of getting the right type of food to the people who need it. A lot of food pantry food requires preparation, which doesn’t work if you don’t have housing. 

Yeah, we do meal distribution, not just food distribution. After you acquire food, then the question is what are we going to do with it, distribution-wise? Our initial goal was let's distribute food to folks who have a place to cook it. Then, once we felt like we knew where that need was, and we were doing a good job with that, we asked what we could do to supplement the work we do with the unhoused and with shelters and social services in our community. We started a Saturday lunch program, and all of that food was from food pantries. 
We had volunteers come in on Saturday morning and make the lunches and put them in boxes, and it grew to two hundred lunches every Saturday.

Amazing. Was all of this work with people from your own church, or did you do any interfaith coalition building?

People in our church started the Matthew 25 Casserole Ministry. There was a mosque we partnered with that was super-interested in urban ministry and how to reach young black men, in particular, who are hungry. Sometimes they turn down a night at the shelter because of pride. We got to where our church served 1,250 people a month, and then they served 1,250 people a month with casseroles, and we matched this mosque, casserole for casserole.

Food and debate both create opportunities for mutual understanding? 

In debate, I met plenty of Muslims. I met plenty of people of Jewish faith. I met plenty of atheists. None of that was ever really something that you thought too much about. But it was striking when a wealthy person from church who lives in, say, Myers Park, a fancy neighborhood in Struckland, would come bake a casserole at the church on Saturday morning, and then they’d go and meet someone from the mosque for the first time. There would be this really cool moment when they’d realize these Muslim folks just want to feed people too. They just want to serve too. Their faith instructs them to do that, just like our faith does.

The people who received the food weren't handed literature to come to the church. They weren't handed literature to come to the mosque. It was just done because it's what you're supposed to do, for moral and ethical reasons. It was a really unique experience. For a lot of people it was their first time engaging in that sort of interfaith collaboration, and I hope that it was powerful to them.

Debate is wonderful training for coalition building, and it's wonderful for showing the ways that essentialist views about identity are really shitty, and showing how much damage and violence is caused by being really reductionist. The casserole project obliterated those kinds of worldviews for some of these folks. There were some groundbreaking moments.