People power needed: Church closes thrift shop, cancels community Thanksgiving dinner due to volunteer shortage
Volunteers at Holy Innocents Episcopal Church on Main Street are improvising while they seek assistance through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to fix up the thrift shop downstairs.
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Thousands of donations to a Highland Falls church's thrift shop are going unsorted and unsold, as the congregation still tries to rebound from the historic July 2023 storm.
The church is seeking more people to sort donations and is trying to renovate the shop space itself that is still unusable because of storm damage.
Volunteers at Holy Innocents Episcopal Church on Main Street are improvising while they seek assistance through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to fix up the thrift shop downstairs.
"We all know that the flood of July 2023 flooded the basement of the parish hall completely," church lay leader Carla Burns said.
Burns says that since July 2023, the church has lost some volunteers who would sort donated clothes and man the store.
Some were retirees who could not handle the work anymore, Burns said, while others have been fully occupied by their day jobs.
The church is buried in donations.
Even including people who can commit to an hour a week, the church needs people to put in regular service, because they are regularly receiving donations.
Just five days worth of donations that were slipped into the slot of the donation shed outside the church included clothes, shoes and household items.
"You could not sort everything that comes into that shed in one session," Burbs said. "Bags have been moved into the barn. There's tons and tons of clothing and household goods that have to be sorted."
The volunteers have held daylong pop-up thrift shops in an undamaged space above the damaged shop space.
Volunteer Ann Taylor said it has been difficult because they have to work around the many other community events they host here.
"Fellowship after church, the Boy Scouts, the food pantry, the thrift store," Taylor listed, "so this is a highly utilized space."
Church leaders told News 12 they are seeking repair estimates, still lobbying FEMA for assistance, and hoping to have the thrift shop fully repaired in 2025.
They said the church is eligible to apply for government assistance because its event space often acts as a community space, especially when it becomes the village's main polling place during elections.
Whether they can actually reopen the shop depends heavily on whether they can attract enough volunteers to organize a growing mountain of donations.
Church leaders say the lack of volunteers has caused the church to change or cancel other events, too.
For example, for the first time in 15 years, Holy Innocents is not serving a community Thanksgiving meal because of a volunteer shortage.
