John Kuhns
Sweet Home Gleaners is here to help the community. Our mission is to help people to better nutrition through gleaning.
We are a group of low-income people who gather leftover crops and food reaching its expiration date from the community and utilize those items to bolster our food budgets. By the best records we have, our organization can trace its roots to 1982. We started as a small group of families that needed help on providing food for their families and saw that there was food going to waste in the fields. Other families in the community were identified that were elderly and needed the food, but couldn’t go to the field to pick.
Thus was born the idea of having a gleaner family adopt an elderly family in order to receive food. While the food was free, getting it to the people that needed it wasn’t, so the need for fund raising presented itself. It started with yard sales and bake sales and then a donation of several thousand boxes of rummage and a small shed; later the thrift shop became an ongoing fundraiser.
Three buildings and moves later, the organization was in its present location at 3031 Main St. Plans were made to buy the building and it was discovered that it would be much better for the organization and the community if the organization was recognized as a non-profit.
Applications were submitted in 1986 and the organization was incorporated and recognized by the federal government as a non-profit organization under section 501 c 3. Since then we continue to be supported by our community and continue to grow.
In 2006 we distributed more than 300,000 pounds of food along with several thousand pounds of non-food items to over 300 families in the Sweet Home area. While we are currently only serving 97 families, these are mostly our core families. Some families only need us for a month or three and then move on financially or physically.
Meanwhile we continue to gather food from local stores and farms as well as receiving foodstuffs through Oregon Food Bank and Linn Benton Food Share.
We recently upgraded our truck to a 20-foot refrigerated model to help keep the food fresh as we transport it. Thank you to the Lebanon Community Hospital and The Ford Foundation. The community continues to support us through their donations (tax deductible) and by shopping with us.
Our Thrift Shop operation is recognized throughout the area as giving good value. This is due in part to the community donating good items to us for resale.
Donations can be a sore spot, especially during garage sale season or during the winter months. Of our current shop workers only about eight out of 23 directly process donations.
Sounds sufficient, but these people don’t work every day and don’t work full days when they do work.
This usually gets us far behind during the summer days and we try to keep the donations door open as much as possible. Once the fire lanes are almost blocked we have to stop accepting donations.
The other problem is after-hours donations. These are illegal per Oregon law, but that isn’t the point. After-hours donations are in the public view and therefore are processed by the less than desirable local element and subject to the vagaries of Mother Nature.
Also, this seems to be the time people like to leave those items that our signs state that we cannot accept. This means much of our time and some of our funds are diverted to sending items to the trash. We gladly accept donations whenever we can and appreciate all usable donations we receive.
Some of our donations are used to provide emergency assistance to people who have lost all to fire or flood in our area. We are trying to grow so that we will be able to accept the donations when they are coming faster than we can process at the time.
One of the things we are looking at is expanding where we are. This is advantageous in that when you move people have to look for you and don’t always want to take the effort. It also means that you don’t have to move things.
We have been trying several different things to raise money to build an expansion and in the past several years have raised enough to put in most of the foundation.
We are looking for grants and donations to help us get going so that we can physically separate the food operation from the thrift shop operation.
Another option we are looking into is moving to a larger location. An advantage there is that we wouldn’t be involved in the building process and would be able to reorganize without having to close off some areas while we worked on them.
Of course, this also involves a significant financial expense and we will need assistance for this option as well.
To sum it all up, we have been here a long time and expect to remain a part of the community for a long time to come. We appreciate all that the community does for us and want to work together to improve our community. Thanks for all you do for us.
John Kuhns is coordinator of the Sweet Home Gleaners.