Don’t let the name fool you, while their sign still says “Dawson Community Food Bank & Thrift Store,” the long-running 501(c)(3) charity has always opened its pantry doors to Dahlonega residents.
But now that they have successfully relocated operations from their previous home near the North Georgia Premium Outlets to a facility inside Lumpkin County, that mission has only grown.
“We actually support over 3,000 families a month,” volunteer Dan Dorfeld explained to The Nugget during a recent facility tour. “And it used to be mostly Dawson, but now of our 3,000, 900 are coming from Lumpkin County, and growing.”
The charity’s model of combining a thrift store and food bank dates back nearly 23 years, and is the brain child of founder and Director Linda Benson.
What started out as an amateur operation run by Benson and her husband out of their Forsyth County home eventually expanded and moved to their church, the Soul Filling Station, and ultimately to its own prominent retail location in Dawson County.
After their lease expired about a year ago, Benson discovered the site of a former Bitcoin mining operation at 92 Chestatee Industrial Park Drive, just off of Burnt Stand Road.
“We’re actually two miles inside the Lumpkin County border. We want to become established in Lumpkin,” Dorfeld explained.
To that end, the non-profit plans to host its first ever fundraising race, dubbed the Outrun Hunger 5K, on Saturday, October 24 in Yahoola Creek Park.
All proceeds will go directly to help support north Georgians struggling with food insecurity, including 1,900 seniors and 2,400 children.
Dorfeld said, so far, the amount of publicity they have received for the upcoming race is “amazing.”
And that’s really the whole point.
“It’s not about the money. We are going to raise money, but we could raise that much money from a grant. It’s about community awareness,” he said.
FACILITY TOUR
Dorfeld took The Nugget on a tour of the unique structure that houses the food bank and thrift store and explained the work that went into converting the defunct Bitcoin mining center to a usable facility.
“Once they found the place, I tried to talk [Linda] out of it. It was a train wreck. First of all, there was no electricity, there was no air conditioning. They were running a data center just with fans … It was all dark in here. We had to use our cell phone flashlights to look around,” Dorfeld recalled.
The floor of what is now the thrift store was completely covered in auto parts, with rusted server racks lining the walls.
Now it has been cleaned up, painted, and a $50,000 air conditioning system has been installed courtesy of a grant from Sawnee EMC.
Dorfeld said the thrift store, which is open daily except for Wednesdays and Sundays, supports only about 35-40 percent of the non-profit’s operating expenses, with grants making up the rest of funding.
He said Benson could probably raise prices in the all-volunteer thrift store, where the price on all clothing items is only $2 each, but “she knows that the community needs that stuff.”
“If someone need something and they’re really hurting, she’ll just give it to them. That would never happen at any other place,” Dorfeld noted.
As for their food supplies, most of it is procured from two major food banks in the region: the Atlanta Area Food Bank and the Georgia Mountain Food Bank.
“There are 60 agencies in the Georgia Mountain Food Bank area, and we have now become the largest in terms of volume and people served, specifically for food,” Dorfeld indicated.
But the charity supplements those deliveries by picking up their own food six days a week from stores like Publix, Walmart, Food Lion and Kroger, using an air conditioned truck donated through the Feeding America Program.
“The amount of abundance of supply in this country is crazy. No one should go hungry,” Dorfeld said, noting it’s all about the logistics of collecting and distributing the surplus food before it goes bad.
Next to the food storage room is a warehouse where deliveries are taken from the larger food banks. A pallet of bananas arrived from the Georgia Mountain Food Bank during the middle fo the tour.
“We don’t always know what we’re going to get,” Dorfeld added.
OPEN QUALIFICATIONS
Dorfeld said the Dawson Community Food Bank is not tied to any particular faith or denomination, and does not place many requirements on their food assistance.
“Other places do a lot of qualifications—They have to be on SNAP benefits or whatever. We have them fill out a form that establishes the need, but we do a bit of the honor system, which some people don’t like,” he said.
But he cited the large disparity between “the haves and the have-nots” in the area, with 14.3 percent of Lumpkin residents living below the poverty level, more than four points higher than Dawson County.
Dorfeld said the main rule is that food bank customers may only visit once per week.
“They could get some stuff and take advantage of us, but that might happen five percent of the time,” Dorfeld said.
He said volunteers are more focused on helping the elderly get their boxes of food loaded than verifying someone’s eligibility.
“People can get hung up on, ‘Do they need it?’ If you’re here enough, you’ll see that there’s plenty of need,” Dorfeld added.
Dorfeld said the organization has grown its volunteer base through community service options and, most importantly, positive word-of-mouth.
“As an example, we were recruited by our neighbor, and my wife and I started two years ago,” Dorfeld, who volunteers each Tuesday, said. “We recruited two more neighbors.”
Benson said a love for people is the essence of the entire operation.
“I have always loved people, and just want to help. And a lot of them feel uncomfortable going to ask for food, so I try to love on them and let them know that this is temporary,” she said.
REACHING OUT
Dorfeld said he is confident that the people who need help will find the food bank, but he hopes to organically expand the organization’s reach within Dahlonega.
“When we’re talking about donations and grants within Lumpkin County, the business community pretty much don’t know us,” he said, adding he hopes that the Outrun Hunger 5K will help change that.
So far, Lumpkin businesses Chestatee Ford and North Georgia Concrete have both generously signed on as sponsors of the race, which will be organized by Five Star NTP.
To register for the Outrun Hunger 5K, visit www.fivestarntp.com and select the event from the dropdown menu. To learn more about the Dawson Community Food Bank & Thrift Store, including information on how to donate or volunteer, visit www.dawsoncommunityfoodbank.org.