Local ministry helps to feed those in need

For the last 17 years, business owner Timothy Smith, his wife Tina, and an expanding group of enthusiastic volunteers have made it their mission to reduce food insecurity in the entire North Georgia region, and for most of that time Dahlonega has been at the center of their efforts.  Unseen Hand Ministry operates a mobile pantry that distributes food from the parking lot of Blackburn Elementary School in Dahlonega to anywhere between 450-600 families a month.
The food bank operates on the third Saturday of each month from 8 a.m. to noon. Unlike many food banks at permanent locations, Unseen Hand does not require recipients to reside in a particular county in order to receive assistance, although they do collect some basic information including name, address and the number of household members in order to meet reporting requirements from their current food supplier, the Georgia Mountain Food Bank [GMFB] in Gainesville.
“We have to show where the merchandise is going, but we’re not going to ask for things like Social Security numbers,” Tina Smith said of the simple paperwork.
Unfortunately, in a time of growing food insecurity, Timothy Smith said the GMFB has told him he should begin searching for an alternate food supplier due to inventory shortages.
“They’re cutting back on how much we can order. I only know of one way to deal with it, and that’s to go back and do what we did 17 years ago and get it from the retail store. That’s the only place I know to get it,” Smith explained.
Smith said that he has partnered with Ingles in Dawsonville in the past, but sourcing food directly from a grocery chain, rather than the GMFB, would effectively quadruple his prices.
Now Smith is urgently requesting donations of either food or money from the public.
“We'll take either one. Some people don’t want to mess with the hassle of buying stuff and taking it somewhere, they’d rather just give $10 or whatever. That suits us just fine,” he said.

HISTORY OF GIVING

Timothy Smith operates his non-profit 501(c)3 organization, Unseen Hand Ministry, from the Cumming office of his concrete business. He provides his own company’s equipment: a refrigerated truck, forklift, and portable restrooms. Distribution is also done on a strictly volunteer basis to keep overhead low.
“We’ve got churches, foundations, businesses that give us money to buy the food with … So we take the money that people give us and we buy food, and we do toys at Christmastime, and if we run across a deal somewhere on say, laundry detergent, shampoo, something like that, then occasionally we’ll buy that thing and throw it in there, too. But we don’t spend money on anything else,” Smith said.
Smith said the charity began their work in Cumming, where he lives, in conjunction with a group of local churches. He said they started out small, serving around 75 families, but as the operation grew he had to relocate.
On the very first day at the second Cumming location, Smith said he was passed on a note to give someone a call. When he got back home he phoned the number, and a woman in Dahlonega answered.
“She was 75 years old,” Smith recalled. “She said ‘There’s a lot of other people that live around me that need help, but they don’t have transportation to come to Cumming to get it. They don’t have a car, they don’t have money for gas, they can’t come down there to get it. Is there some way you could get closer to where we are?’”
Smith promised her he would look into it, but found little appetite among his partners to serve another community in addition to their own. After praying with his wife, Smith said he still felt called to do what he could to help.
With the support of other “mission-minded” friends and using his existing connection at Ingles, Unseen Hand began distributing food at Shoal Creek Baptist Church on Highway 115.
The operation moved to Antioch Baptist Church on Auraria Road for a number of years, where Smith said it grew so large that the church property could no longer contain it.
Smith then talked to former Lumpkin County Schools Superintendent Dewey Moore, who offered the use of the Blackburn Elementary School parking lot.
Initially, recipients filled out the paperwork at Antioch and then traveled down the road to Blackburn to pick up the food.
But Smith said the COVID pandemic ultimately forced them to consolidate to a drive-thru operation at Blackburn, a model which is still in use today.

SMOOTH OPERATION

On Saturday, that process started when a vehicle pulled into the Blackburn parking lot and was immediately guided to Sharon Redd, a smiling volunteer waiting to hand out the required paperwork and explain the rest of the process.
Each vehicle was then directed to a parking spot to fill out their paperwork, at which point they would enter into one of several rows of waiting traffic.
“We have it pretty well organized,” Redd told The Nugget. “Sometimes people get a little contentious out here, so we had to be very strict on how we’re doing the parking because we don’t want anybody feeling like they’ve gotten preferential treatment.”
Redd noted that on this particular weekend the traffic skewed mainly local, with the majority coming from Dahlonega, Dawsonville or Murrayville.
She noticed the ministry was already having to make adjustments based on the limited food availability at the NGFB.
“So there have been people in the past who’ve picked up for people like a granny who can’t get out or whatever, and a lot of times we’ve let them, but this time because there’s a shortage we have to be strict,” Redd said.
Redd’s daughter Addison was volunteering over on the pickup side of the operation, while her father, Dick Kenzie, provided spiritual ministry to those waiting in their vehicles.
“We’ve got a group of folks that walk up and down that line, because they wait about an hour and a half,” Kenzie said. “And so we walk along and we pray for them. And we ask them [first]. You know, some people might not want to, but it’s quite respectful. The stories that you hear and see, any one of them would be worthy of the newspaper.”
Kenzie described some of the stories he had heard working the line as both “authentic” and “heartbreaking.”
He said Unseen Hand is a food pantry like no other because of both the ease of qualification and the quantity of food supplied to each household.
At the first station, vehicles will pick up a box of frozen meat: chicken, ground beef, sandwich meat, sausage or other retail deli products. Then they will pull forward to receive non-perishable items like diced tomatoes, baked beans, sliced carrots, and peanut butter, before advancing to a final station of frozen bread and pastries.
All of the items are loaded by smiling, spirited volunteers, and recipients do not have to exit their vehicles at any point in the process.
“The amount of food [Smith] gives out per person is a bunch, it is, but these people have to get enough to eat to make it worth their driving. Remember, the gas they’re spending would otherwise be grocery money,” Kenzie added.

ENLISTING HELP

Smith emphasized that every dollar donated to the ministry will go directly to feeding people, and donations are tax deductible.
“The charity doesn’t have telephone numbers, the charity doesn’t have cars. Our overhead is extraordinarily low,” he said.
Anyone wishing to donate food can simply drop it off at Blackburn Elementary on the third Saturday of each month. For those wishing to donate money, checks can be made out to Unseen Hand Ministry: 5650 Riley Road, Cumming, 30028.
Smith said he anticipates a continued increase in demand for food assistance due to inflation, even as the available supply tightens.
“I don’t own a crystal ball, and if I did I wouldn’t know how to use the thing. But if the price of fuel and food and other things around us continue to rise like it has, I suspect our crowd’s probably going to get bigger. Back several years ago, in 2007-2008 when we had the housing crisis, we were distributing food in the middle of that and there were times we had 700-800 [households] a month. So we’ve seen bigger crowds. I hope we don’t see it again,” he concluded.