They started out small. Their first foray was Free Pie Day, during which Project M members stood on a Belfast street corner and handed out slices of pecan pie, pumpkin pie and apple pie to passers-by. The idea was to spur community and conversation, one slice at a time. Free Pie Day inspired similar efforts in Washington, Brooklyn and elsewhere. Most important, it inspired PieLab.

“WHEN I SAW THEM out front, I walked over,” Charles Johnson, a beauty-shop owner, said. “I saw the sign” — the one that spelled out LAB with stainless-steel pegs and washers — “and I asked, ‘Is this some kind of radio technology or space-center stuff?’ ”

PieLab opened in a makeshift space on a Greensboro side street in May of last year. Five of the original Project M team members in Maine had come south at the invitation of the Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization (HERO), a housing-advocacy nonprofit, which also sponsored community-minded local initiatives. The Project M team conceived of their pie shop as a pop-up — a temporary cafe — describing it as a “negative-energy inverter, fueled by pie.”

The term “pop-up” implies that a concept may be too cutting-edge to sustain. And so it was with PieLab. No one expected this pop-up to last, least of all the designers who transformed the original space in a breakneck three-week stretch and managed it with gusto for the rest of the spring and summer.

But that first day at the PieLab was a success. There was music, courtesy of a customer with an acoustic guitar. The crowd was diverse. Ideas were exchanged. Intergenerational friendships were forged. The take, at two bucks per apple-pie slice, was something like $400.

PieLab had visual style. And PieLab had a formula, a back-of-the-bar-napkin equation, sketched in Maine and refined on the ground in Greensboro:

PieLab = a neutral place + a slice of pie.

A neutral place + a slice of pie = conversation.

Conversation = ideas + design.

Ideas + design = positive change.

Yet for all its ambition, PieLab never had a business plan or a firm grasp on what sort of change was sought. This was intentional. Bielenberg wasn’t much interested in long-term goals; he believed in setting something in motion and letting the momentum guide the effort.

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The plan was simply to open PieLab’s doors, begin conversations with the people of Greensboro and encourage them to create progressive inititatives of their own. “We had an idea,” said Brian W. Jones, a collaborator from Virginia. “That was it. We opened without a business license or the complete approval of the health inspector.”

PieLab’s logo — two crimp-crusted pie slices, positioned tip to tip to form a double beaker, an hourglass or some other old-school scientific apparatus — said it all. Here food wasn’t just fuel. And design wasn’t merely a way to arrange your living room furniture. Design, when applied to food, could be a catalytic force for good, even if the good wasn’t specified.

PieLab operated out of temporary quarters for four months. HERO, under the direction of Pam Dorr, served as host and landlord. Six years earlier, Dorr left a job as a production manager for the Gap in California to join the social-service efforts in Hale County. Dorr collaborated with Project M on earlier projects, finding practical applications for their ideas. To support PieLab, she secured government grants, helped build ties in the community and served as a hands-off adviser.

That first PieLab space, in a tin-roofed clapboard home behind the HERO offices, was spare and studied, with glossy white walls, high ceilings and open shelving. A hand-cranked cash register sat on the front counter, alongside a silverware tray and a decommissioned library card catalog. Inscribed with the names and check-out histories of old books, the cards served as sketch pads and, on occasion, order pads for $3 slice-and-coffee combos.

The earnestness was palpable. The Project M crew baked pie and brewed coffee. They crimped crusts with forks and piled on pears and pecans gathered and delivered by neighbors. They designed Web sites for the Hale County Humane Society and created logos for the nearby city of Northport.

For the socially engaged members of Project M, PieLab was a clubhouse. For small-town characters, it was a magnet. College students from Sewanee, Tenn., ate through all the pecan pie one afternoon. A film director just back from Thailand came in for coffee and talked about his next project, a Big Foot horror movie.

Over time, the Project M folk befriended Scott Hamilton, an aspiring artist. They designed a Web site on which he posted his paintings of cities of the future, shaped like skyscraping minarets. When Charles Johnson, a regular, was in a good mood, he performed on the pine floors, moving to a line-dance routine called the Cupid Shuffle.

Within a few months of opening, following a spate of positive design-industry press, PieLab-inspired efforts popped up in cities like Portland, Ore. In Greenville, Ala., southwest of Montgomery, Nancy Rhodes recently opened Polka Dots Café, cater-corner from the town’s Confederate memorial. She serves kolaches, a Czech pastry popular in Texas. Inspired by PieLab, she plans to operate a “neutral space,” where people of all races and classes can gather.

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“THAT FIRST SPACE was really grass roots,” Megan Deal recalled. “It was so easy to build, so easy to run. There was an honesty about it, a purity. It was all about pie and conversation. All about what we intended. It worked.”

More significant, it seemed to work in the Black Belt, a region that a New York Times writer, in the days before the cotton economy went bust, described as a “garden of slavery.” Poverty rates may register higher in other counties in the region, and racial disparities have proved wider, but Hale County has long been the Black Belt’s front porch. Hale was where James Agee and Walker Evans drew their famed portrait of Depression-era tenant farmer life, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” a book that has served as a primary text for students of rural America in the decades since. And Hale was where Samuel Mockbee and D. K. Ruth established the Rural Studio, a design-and-build program for Auburn University architecture students, focused on creating high-concept, low-cost homes for indigent residents. Don’t be “house pets to the rich,” Mockbee told his charges, sounding a clarion that inspired, among others, John Bielenberg.

All this attention to social ills did not come without social costs. Almost 75 years have passed since Agee and Evans traveled the county to document the lives of poor white folk, but their work still has the power to inflame residents. If outsiders see Evans’s photos and Agee’s text as a candid examination of an ailing region, insiders often see the book as the product of crusading interlopers, the sort of people who parachute into the region today with little understanding of local concerns.

Amanda Buck is not the only Project M collaborator who has walked into the Hale County Library on Main Street to check out “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” and learned that lesson. “Everybody who comes down here wants to read that book,” Buck recalled a librarian saying as she handed her a copy. “You know this doesn’t paint the whole picture. There are other perspectives.”

BUCK, A NATIVE OF Brunswick, Ohio, who was a member of the original 2009 Project M program and later traveled south to work at PieLab, showed up thinking that she was to be a “change agent.” But when she talked about change, many Hale County residents heard condemnation. No matter, she thought. “What are we doing here if we’re not working for change?”

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In the Black Belt, Project M collaborators could afford to be idealists. They worked hard, but their lives unspooled like summer-camp deferments. “On weekends we swam in the river,” Brian Jones recalled. “We wandered down Main Street at sunset and admired the way the light bounced off the buildings.”

They ate lunches of fried whiting and fried okra at Flava, a soul-food cafe set in a brick compound one block off Main Street. And they listened as Eugene Lyles, who built the restaurant in the 1960s, told them that, back when the black-power movement was ascendant, he was an idealist, too. Weekday afternoons, they walked the town, past shuttered storefronts. At night, they sometimes played four-square games on Main Street, sidestepping pulpwood trucks as they downshifted from the highway﻿﻿. They measured success in modest exchanges. Buck and Robin Mooty, another early PieLab worker, designed and painted a new sign for Charles Johnson’s salon. In return, Johnson took Buck and Deal golfing.

PieLab efforts played well to the news media. Here was hope, and apple pie, and a seemingly robust new economic engine in the Black Belt, a seemingly hopeless American place. And here was an effort that aligned nicely with the national trend toward food activism. “PieLab provides a neutral environment in a traditionally segregated town where people from every race and class are welcome to sit together and talk candidly about whatever is on their mind,” Brian Jones told Fast Company magazine.

PieLab, along with projects like Mission Pie in San Francisco (which employs at-risk youth and uses local ingredients for its pies), is part of an American movement to deploy food-focused initiatives, including restaurant operation and artisanal food production, to foster social change. The culinary establishment embraced PieLab. The magazine Southern Living, the prevailing arbiter of middle-class regional taste, dubbed its apple pie one of the South’s best. The James Beard Foundation named the Main Street PieLab space one of three 2010 finalists for its restaurant design award.

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All the attention buoyed the PieLab collaborators. But it also created problems. When Project M first arrived in Greensboro, some folk bristled at the language it employed. The conflicts began with the 2007 Buy-a-Meter project. To get the initiative under way, Project M used stark black-and-white photos (and starker messages) to draw attention to area families who lacked access to the municipal water supply. The pamphlet campaign raised about $50,000. HERO, working in conjunction with Project M, used this money to purchase and install more than 100 water meters. Beyond Alabama, Buy-a-Meter was celebrated as a financial and critical success. But back home, the slogan — “In Hale County, Alabama, Water Is Not a Right,” splayed across a gatefold photograph of Greensboro’s Main Street — did not always play so well. Tensions increased when a group of designers proposed a National Design Center for Rural Poverty Programs in Greensboro. To make clear the need, they described Hale County as a place where an “impoverished population suffers from substandard housing, education, health care and job opportunities.”

In Greensboro, such sweeping generalizations, no matter their accuracy, stung. “What does some guy in Maine know about my life in Alabama?” asked Ann Langford, chief clerk of the Hale County Probate Court and onetime Rural Studio administrator. “Who gave him the right to speak for us?”

By that point, a number of new voices were speaking for the Black Belt. At least seven windmill-tilting organizations were doing good works in Hale County, including Project Horseshoe Farm, a residential mental-health facility. Those programs brought youthful energy to Greensboro. They also brought trouble.

“You have the same town-and-gown tensions here that you would find in a small Massachusetts college town,” said Winnie Cobbs, a retired college professor who operates a local bed-and-breakfast. As she talked, two young women, wearing jogging bras and college mascot tank tops, race-walked through downtown. Inside PieLab, a Horseshoe Farm fellow hunched over her laptop, filling out medical-school application forms.

“It’s universal,” Cobbs said. “You hear the same talk about the loose morals of young kids. And you hear the same suspicion of the motives of outsiders.”

“I WAS NAÏVE,” BUCK SAID. “I knew nothing about baking pies and running a business.”

As Buck talked, she squirmed in her chair in what was the original pop-up PieLab space and is now used by AmeriCorps Vista volunteers who run BikeLab, a bicycle-repair and reclamation project also initiated by Project M and HERO. “We came with preconceived notions about what we would find in Alabama,” she said.

In October 2009, as the PieLab crew worked to refurbish their new brick-fronted space on Main Street — the one with polished wood floors and a balloon-whisk bathroom light fixture — tensions reached a pitch in what came to be known as the “cake thing” or the “poster incident.”

Designed by a couple of the PieLab workers, the poster was printed in an array of colors, the most arresting of which was bright red. Rendered in a bold, black font and capped by an exclamation point, were the words: “Eat pie.” Stacked beneath, in far smaller type, was a command that began with a sexually explicit four-letter word and ended with the word “cake.”

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To the PieLab crew, the poster was an over-the-top exercise in sloganeering. To members of the Greensboro community, who followed the workings of PieLab on various Web sites, the document was a totem of the group’s cultural insensitivities.

“The humor might have played well in Brooklyn,” Buck said, taking pains to explain that the posters were never intended for local distribution. “But here it wasn’t funny at all.”

Posters quickly found their way into the hands of city and county powerbrokers. Things came to a head during a heated conversation in the street, which Pam Dorr, of HERO, playfully described as a “near riot.”

“I understand what they intended,” Winnie Cobbs said. “It was playful and frivolous. I got the Marie Antoinette reference. It takes us back to the time of the French Revolution. But you have to pick your place to use that word. And posters, plastered around this town, would not have been that place.”

Ann Langford still keeps a rolled copy beneath her desk at the courthouse. “I can’t take a poster with that word on it home,” she said. Langford understands youthful indiscretion. Yet she still gets agitated when she talks about the incident.

“So is that the best that you can come up with after going off to college?” she asked a group of PieLab workers who came to apologize. “Is that what your parents sent you to school to learn? I thought y’all were supposed to set examples.”

THREE MONTHS HAVE now passed since “the takeover.” That’s the term that Pam Dorr uses to describe the process by which she jettisoned the design side of the PieLab equation. Her technique was simple: Rather than renew some of the governmental programs under which the original crew was employed, Dorr allowed certain sources of financing to lapse. One by one, the founders departed.

Under Dorr’s leadership, PieLab may still realize some of the transformative goals imagined by the original crew. Early in the process, PieLab began working with YouthBuild, a job-training-and-remedial-education program, affiliated with the U.S. Department of Labor. At first, 20-somethings from programs like that were ancillary to the PieLab effort. Now job training appears to be primary. Some of the changes have been more pragmatic. PieLab no longer opens at 9 in the morning, as it did when the Project M crew ran the show. Gone are the stacks of take-one, leave-one cards with recipes for graduate-student fodder like tofu stroganoff. Gone, too, is the pie-only menu. PieLab now serves homemade biscuits at 7 in the morning to farmers and construction workers. In the afternoon, it sells butter-crusted quiches, piled with precut nubs of ham, to lunchtime tourists, drawn by glossy photos in magazines like Bon Appétit.

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One recent morning, Melvin Webster, who is studying construction skills through YouthBuild while working on his G.E.D., drank coffee and talked of how he learned to blend pecan butter from cracked nuts for a HERO-sponsored initiative called Pecans! It was a task in which he seemed to take great pride. Across the counter, Sam Heartsill, a mother of two whose work at PieLab is financed in part by a federally subsidized employment program, drained a bottle of lemon-juice concentrate into homemade custard. At PieLab, both the food and the focus are still works in progress. Dorr leads the progress. As executive director of HERO, she has helped dozens of Hale County families move from busted trailers to tidy bungalows. Now, in her work with PieLab, she has proposed courses for young cooks to learn about the virtues of local produce and traditional techniques. And she holds hospitality classes for those aspiring to careers in the food industry.

When Dorr talks about PieLab, she typically drops the word “lab” and the baggage associated with it. As in, “Let’s go down to Pie and get a slice.” Or, “Modern Woodmen of America are having their lunch meeting at Pie.” Or, “Let’s go see what the girls are up to down at Pie.”

“It began as cool place to drink coffee and eat pie,” she said between bites of a blueberry-and-cream-cheese pastry cup. “Now it has the chance to be more than that. It may not be as cool, but it’s a life-full place.”