Dave Carpenter of Covington regularly drives from his home in Covington to volunteer at the Helping in His Name food pantry in Stockbridge. The 72-year-old retiree has made the 45-minute trek for nearly two years, because he supports the food pantry’s mission to help people in need.

  “Too many people nowadays, they have a job and can’t support their family,” said Carpenter. “It used to be that you were just feeding people who didn’t have a job. Now, people who have a job can’t feed their family. It gets to be a tossup on payday whether you’re going to buy food or take your kid to the doctor.”

  “That’s how much I like this food bank,” he continued. “It’s important because we all have a job, to make sure everybody has food. I think that’s one of the things God tasked us with, to feed the hungry.”

    Carpenter was one of 107 volunteers at Helping in His Name who were recently treated to lunch at Southern Belle Farm in McDonough. The volunteers brought their families along for the occasion to enjoy pig calling, chase chickens, and travel through the corn maze at the farm, said Kaye Sheets.

  “They just had a really good time together instead of all the work experience,” she said. “Everybody walked away with a gift, from us and from our vendors, and the 2019 volunteer T-shirt.

  Sheets said the volunteers are an essential element in meeting residents’ food needs in Henry County.

  “We had over 15,000 volunteer hours that were given in the first half of the year,” said Sheets. “That’s $225,000 that we would have had to pay.”

  Sheets said her volunteers do warehouse work, office and administrative duties for the food pantry. Sheets said volunteers also load and unload trucks, load clients’ cars, interview clients and pray for them, as well as assisting with cleaning and maintaining the property at Helping in His Name.

  “Our board members are volunteers,” she said. “They also help establish and maintain the guidelines of the ministry.”

  Sheets said the county’s continued population growth in recent years has resulted in more people being in need locally. The food pantry, she said, serves 1,500 families each month.

  “That doesn’t count the other ministries that we get into, either,” she said. “Even though we have less unemployment, we have more underemplyment, and young people starting families cannot make it when they’re on basic minimum wages without somebody helping. So we’re there to give them a hand up until they can go further.”

  Sheets added that the food pantry works with several church-based homeless ministries in the area, as well as private ministries, to provide food for those who need it.

  “They just don’t have the facilities that are able to acquire and maintain products, so we partner with them to help provide for the homeless in and around Henry County,” said Sheets.

  Sheets said the food pantry

serves the needs of “a growing number of seniors” in the area.

  “Well over 10 percent of our seniors have to choose between medicine and food, and that’s not OK,” she said.

  The food pantry also helps to feed students who are considered homeless.   J.D. Hardin, spokesman for Henry County Schools, reported that 735 students were considered homeless during the 2013-14 school year, and that those figures have risen steadily since then. In 2017-18, a total of 1,174 students in the school system fell into that category.