Athens, WV (WOAY) – A Mercer County food pantry that started farming its own land is now building toward something much larger, with a rural health clinic, a community kitchen and classes for local families in the works.
Helpful Harvest in Athens recently received a $50,000 Kubota grant that helped buy a tractor for its farm. Lisa Davis, founding director of Helpful Harvest Farm & Outreach Center, said the farm was only the first step.
Davis said the pantry serves more than 500 families each week. She said it quickly outgrew its original building, then the two buildings the county helped it purchase. The group is putting up a new facility on its farmland, which Davis said “will house a community center in the front part, and then the back part in the side will be warehouse and distribution.”
The building will also include a small rural health clinic for people without easy access to medical care. Davis said staffing plans are already in place.
“Everything’s tied into food and necessities. And health care is just one more necessity in life that gets overlooked a lot, especially in rural areas of West Virginia,” she said.
Davis said the plans also include:
• A commercial kitchen for community meals
• Budgeting classes
• Music, karate and dance lessons for local children, which people have offered to donate
• Dormitory-style rooms upstairs where visiting groups, like church groups or Boy Scouts helping on the farm, or crews responding to a natural disaster could stay
•A nearly half-acre pond behind the facility stocked for children to fish
“We want to be able to help feed them and have them someplace that they can fellowship and have somewhere to go,” Davis said. “There’s a lot of grandparents raising grandchildren in our community and they’re barely getting by. So we’re trying to ease that burden.”
The group is transitioning to a new name, Helpful Harvest Farm & Outreach Center.
Davis said the building still needs doors, windows, insulation, electrical work and heating and air conditioning. She said quotes to pave the parking lot have topped $500,000.
“We can’t get this done soon enough because the need is here and we have everything in place. We just don’t have the funds to finish everything right now,” she said.
Davis said donations can be made through helpfulharvestfarm.org or by mail to P.O. Box 154, Athens, W.Va.
