Brad Paisley and Kimberly Williams-Paisley Celebrate 1-Year Anniversary of The Store
Brad Paisley and wife Kimberly Williams-Paisley were scheduled to open their free Nashville [...]
Brad Paisley and wife Kimberly Williams-Paisley were scheduled to open their free Nashville grocery store, The Store, in the middle of 2020, but they ultimately moved up that date after the city was hit by a tornado in early March 2020. This week, the couple celebrated The Store's 1-year anniversary, and Williams-Paisley marked the occasion with a post on Instagram. The actress shared a video montage of various interviews she and her husband had given about The Store, as well as footage of the couple stocking the shelves.
The video ended with a short message from the duo, beginning with Williams-Paisley. "We could not do it without our volunteers," she said. "We just want to say thank you so much for making The Store what it is. We couldn't do it without you." "No way," her husband added. "We hit our one year milestone this month at @thestore_nashville!" Williams-Paisley captioned the post. "This was a challenging and fortuitous time to open a free grocery, as the number of people facing food insecurity jumped in Nashville (as it did in many parts of the country). We couldn't have done it without our wonderful board, hardworking staff, volunteers, corporate sponsors, generous donors and our partner @belmontu. THANK YOU everyone!" she wrote, inviting her followers to visit www.thestore.org to learn more.
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The Store's model is based on the Unity Shoppe in Santa Barbara, California, and Paisley told Andy Cohen during an appearance on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live in September that they were serving five times the amount of people they had anticipated.
"Our original model was to have this great model of a grocery store, which has dignity for people," the singer shared. "They can come through, and it's different than something like a soup kitchen or something like that. They have a choice, and there's dignity in choice, they just don't pay. It was working for a week before the pandemic hit, and then we switched to deliveries, and eventually, we will go back to what we intended to be, but right now, we're serving five times what we expected, and since March, we have provided 500,000 meals in Nashville. We didn't expect that. We thought we would do about 100,000 in the first six months, and here we are, but that's the times we're living in."
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One day after the anniversary of The Store, Paisley and Williams-Paisley celebrated their wedding anniversary, which Paisley commemorated with a photo of his wife crying. "Happy anniversary @kimberlywilliamspaisley !" he wrote. "Tears of joy... right?"