“I’m happy for doors,” Young said. “We only had one before.”

The building has many doors, including a door to the utility room that can be used to deposit the never-ending stacks of cardboard boxes and a garage door in the basement where large donations like furniture can be dropped off. When Young managed the Helping Hands Thrift Shop, which closed in November 2023, they didn’t have the space to accept furniture donations, and she instead would coordinate drop-offs between donors and recipients.

The Thrive and Thrift building also has two bathrooms, one upstairs for the public and a downstairs one for volunteers. The old location didn’t have any. Young had to tell volunteers to put a lock on the door and a note on the window, and go find a church bathroom to use.

But the excitement of Young and her Friday crew of volunteers was mostly centered on one theme: space.

Laura Carmack, a volunteer with the Thrive and Thrift food pantry, double-checks a list of requested groceries during a shift at the pantry on Friday. (Enterprise photo — Grace McIntyre)

“The old place was down in a basement. It was really narrow — ‘excuse me, excuse me, excuse me,'” said Bernie Clarke, one of the food pantry volunteers, miming how they used to move around the cramped space. “We don’t have to say it anymore.”

As two volunteers helped welcome guests, the spacious food storage room was bustling with volunteers packing groceries based on forms that each guest filled out, circling the items they wanted. Gleaming metal racks held jars, bags and cans organized by type of item. The pantry also has three refrigerators and three full freezers. Everything was moved to the new building on Sunday and organized in just the two days afterward, Young said.

The morning featured another welcome arrival — a small fleet of shopping carts for the volunteers to use for collecting requested groceries. The volunteers unwrapped the bubble wrap from the carts and had wide smiles as they pushed them between the short “aisles” in the food storage area.

“Are you going to write about how happy we are with our carts?” said Barb Dempsey, another volunteer.

Clarke said she had a hard time sleeping last night and felt like it was the first day of school all over again. However, midway through the pantry’s morning shift, she said she was surprised by how smooth everything had gone. There was a steady trickle of guests, including a couple of new families, and everything was calm “like heaven.”

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“It was meant to be”

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Thrive and Thrift is the newly-formed 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that is taking over operation of the Lake Placid Ecumenical Food Pantry, which will be combined with a thrift store. The project has materialized in less than a year, something Young attributes to many people in the community believing in their mission and giving their “time and talents.”

Despite being the kind of person who likes to work behind the scenes, Young found herself taking the lead in this project. She said she was continually amazed by the fundraising efforts.

“If you believe in what you’re doing, you can get the message across,” Young said. “Because from there, then everything else falls into place.”

At the ribbon cutting on Saturday, Nov. 16, each speaker expressed an amazement at how the community rallied behind Thrive and Thrift and how quickly it all came together. Lake Placid Deputy Mayor Jackie Kelly read a statement written by Mayor Art Devlin, who was out of town at the time.

“In my 16 years on the village board, I have never seen a project that has moved so fast,” Devlin wrote. “From our meeting at Heaven Hill in the spring to the opening in six short months is truly a miracle.”

The food pantry will be open every Friday from 9 a.m. to noon. The thrift shop is not currently accepting donations, Young said, although they are still hoping to open sometime in December. Already, she has had more than 40 people sign up to volunteer with the shop and she is still working out how many days they will be open each week.