Fort Mill Care Center on a mission to keep serving ‘a pretty darn little good area’

The Fort Mill Care Center has been on mission for more than three decades – to provide emergency assistance to those in the township who need it most, said Director Carol Higgins

Soon, the center hopes to provide more – and more efficient – service. It recently rolled out a $400,000 campaign to raise money for a permanent home for the all-volunteer run, nonprofit organization. It’s the first capital campaign launched by the center, and it is essential to the organization’s future, said Higgins.

The old Fort Mill High School building on Banks Street was home to the center for more than a decade. It has been demolished and the nonprofit center, which serves Fort Mill, Tega Cay, Indian Land and Van Wyck, is operating out of a small storefront on Tom Hall Street, in the Tom Hall Street Plaza.

The location is too small to serve clients effectively, Higgins said.

Center operators haveturned down food drive offers from the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts and the post office, Higgins said. The food pantry is about the size of two large rooms and cannot accommodate large influxes of food donations.

“We’re limited,” Higgins said.

The center is also unable to accept perishable donations. That means no milk and eggs, and no Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, Higgins said. The center also cannot accept clothing donations due to space constraints.

The time of year is another concern.

Not as many schools and churches hold donation drives, and both physical and financial donations are leaner during the summer months, Higgins said.

“We do have a drop down in donations,” Higgins said. “We’re just not on the radar in the summertime.”

The 3,000 square foot former Firehouse restaurant building at 2760 Old Nation Road has been purchased as the new home for the center. It is undergoing renovations by volunteer contractors and laypeople.

“We have to turn a restaurant into an office space and a kitchen into a pantry,” Higgins said. “It’s coming along.”

The new building will not solve the space concerns. There will be about the same amount of pantry and operations space as the center has now. In what organizers call Phase Two of the building campaign, the center hopes to expand on the property and build additional pantry storage. That phase of the project will not begin until the first part of the campaign is paid off, Higgins said.

The center has raised $150,000 toward its $400,000 goal, according to its website.

While there is no official timeline for the move, Higgins hopes the center will be ready by the fall.

“We want to keep the capital campaign in people’s eyes,” Higgins said. “We can’t go back to what we used to do on Banks Street until we’re in a new place.”

Higgins is sure members of the community will continue to support the center as it has done in the past.

“It tells you that Fort Mill is a pretty darn little good area,” she said.

This story was originally published July 9, 2015 at 5:40 PM with the headline "Fort Mill Care Center on a mission to keep serving ‘a pretty darn little good area’."