North Fulton Community Charities
Each year on Holy Thursday the universal Church makes a special request. The Church asks that the offertory collected at the Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper be given directly to the poor. At St. Thomas Aquinas, the offertory collected on Thursday evening will support North Fulton Community Charities.
St. Thomas has had a lasting relationship with NFCC. Before North Fulton Community Charities was established, St. Thomas partnered with other area churches to support The Community Clothes Closet, a local thrift shop that opened in 1971. In 1991, The Community Clothes Closet became part of North Fulton Community Charities. A year earlier, a parishioner of St. Thomas Aquinas, Barbara Duffy, who volunteered at the clothes closet became the first full-time employee of North Fulton Community Charities. Today, she serves as the organization’s Executive Director. I talked with her recently about the work of North Fulton Community Charities.
Tell me a little about North Fulton Community Charities.
Barbara Duffy: We serve the people north of the Chattahoochee: Roswell, Alpharetta, John’s Creek, Milton, and Mountain Park. We have a service center which includes a thrift shop and a food pantry. We give away nine tons of food a week and see one-hundred families a day. Last year, we helped 4,500 families. We partner with 72 area churches. We are not technically a faith-based organization, but we are all here in response to our faith, so we are walking our faith.
Is there anything new at NFCC?
Barbara Duffy: We just kicked off something we call Client Choice. When families come in for food, they get checked in and then they are directed to a computer where they can shop online. No longer is a volunteer shopping for them based on how many persons are in the family. They can get what they want and what they need. It’s much more powerful for the families because now they are in charge of what they take home. We also have an educational center across the street. We’ve always taught budgeting and English language courses, but now we offer four levels of English language, a computer lab, certification programs and job coaching, where individuals can work with mentors.
The other exciting thing is that we have been working with Kennesaw State University’s School of Social Work for the past year. We are designing a pilot study to track a group of families over a span of a decade or more who are stuck in generational poverty. What we were set up to do is to help families in situational poverty. When something happens to a family, we can help them until they get back on their feet. But the families in generational poverty are different. They live in the moment and the whole idea of planning and setting money aside is not what they know. We can’t fault them for that. We are coming with middle class values and that’s not what they grew up with, so we have to find new ways to help them.
At what would outsiders be most surprised?
Barbara Duffy: We often think that folks who need help have done something wrong or they’re lazy or whatever. The folks I know have worked harder than I ever thought of working. They’re trying to figure out how they are going to get to the grocery store when they don’t have a car and how are they going to get the kid home from school who’s sick and those kinds of things, the things we take for granted.
When I talk to new volunteers, they always say, “I don’t know if I did any good for anyone else, but I have gained so much from the interaction with people here.” I tell folks this is a place to serve and to be served and they’re both important. We go out of our way to make a place for volunteers and a place for families to come where they feel they are part of a community.
For more about how to get involved in North Fulton Community Charities, go to NFCChelp.org.