The doors to our new Food Pantry opened for the first time on June 7th and we hit the ground running. On our first day, 38 families were served while 15 volunteers worked hard to get all the systems up and running correctly. In addition to our location change, we’ve also moved to a new database management system from Oasis Insights in hopes of streamlining our check-in and check-out process.

Oasis is a software tool used by countless food pantries, food banks and other assisting organizations and, as such, our participation opens up a lot more ways to connect our neighbors to available help than we had before. By signing up at our pantry, their information becomes available (if the client agrees) across the Atlanta Community Food Bank network. We provide a barcode that can be scanned when a neighbor comes in making check-in take a matter of seconds rather than several minutes.

While check-in during our first month took longer (since very few of our clients were already in the system), everyone was patient and the system worked. We’re training more of our volunteers to use Oasis so that we can be better equipped moving forward to get returning clients in the door quickly and new clients in the system in a matter of minutes.

If you haven’t yet been to our new location, please stop by. We’re open Mondays from 4 pm – 6 pm, Thursdays from 10 an – Noon, and Saturdays from 10 am – Noon. There’s plenty of parking and free coffee!