An Interview The Two Georgias Initiative Participant: Melissa Line
Community Helping Place
The #LumpkinMatters Coalition
Community Helping Place has several amazing
programs, from a free clinic to the food pantry,
emergency assistance, and even more than that.
How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected this wide
range of work that you all do every day? Have you
had to shift focus to specific programs or anything
like that?
Yes! Right off the bat, I’ll say that I’m an optimist and I
always look at the bright side. It was really hard for
me in January and February of this
year to feel the urgency of this – it
wasn’t real to me yet. I know the
day that it became real to me was
Friday the 13th of March, it really
sticks out in my mind. We were
having a staff meeting that day
and it turned into a pandemic
response staff meeting, Like, “Oh
wow, this is on our front door and
there’s nothing we can do to stop
it and we need to make some
accommodations right now.”
On the flip side of that, we have a thrift store here at
Community Helping Place that is responsible for about
30 – 40% of our revenue to make our programs
operate. We need to be making close to $1,000 a day
at the thrift store to really make our budget work and
help the number of people that we want to help.
There was an immediate threat to our financial
security because we were faced with closing the thrift
store. The week leading up to March 13th, our sales
had gone as low as $27 in one day - that isn’t even
worth turning the lights on and opening the store.
The first thing we did as a team was decide that
everything else would be on hold except for our food
pantry. The food pantry is the hallmark program here,
we’re the largest food pantry in the county, and we’ve
been around 30 years. It started in the Catholic church
basement and it grew, and now it’s the center and the
hub of the wheel here. Our pantry is open three days
a week, it has regular hours, and it’s big enough to
where it’s like a commercial grocery store, basically.
Trucks are coming in and out, we have 60 or 70
volunteers down here. We just had an audit of our
food pantry and we have almost 700 individual
families who come to the food pantry. We didn’t want
to cut off people’s food supply! Especially at a time
when everything else is in pandemonium. We are in a
food desert here in Dahlonega anyway – the only
supermarket we have is a Walmart, and that’s it.
That was in March, and we ended up closing
everything except the food pantry
through the end of March, all of
April, and a portion of May. At the
clinic, we have two paid staff who
took their regular hours and did
telehealth appointments. They
still refilled prescriptions for
people who have chronic
conditions like diabetes and heart
disease, and people who needed
blood pressure medications still
got their meds. It was a miracle,
but a church and a local business
also helped us deliver food to our
homebound clinic patients who could not leave their
home to get groceries.
What was it like to see the community come
together and support each other? Was it a bright
spot and moment of hope?
Very much so. It was heartwarming – I’ve told people
that we just saw a miracle here. It was like people saw
that we were about to struggle and said they wouldn’t
let us struggle. We had a bunch of older folks in this
community who gave us their stimulus checks – just
gave them to us. Like I said, the rotary club was
amazing, and we had people doing little, online
fundraisers for us, like they would donate their
birthday to our cause – they all just got us through. It
was unbelievable, just really great. It was almost like a
blessing in disguise because it showed us what the
community could do when they come together.
14