With dwindling volunteers and tightening funds, Habitat for Humanity Freeborn/Mower needed to repurpose its mission by closing down its retail outlet in Austin by the end of next month.

It was announced Tuesday afternoon that the Habitat for Humanity Freeborn/Mower Board decided to shut down the ReStore in Austin, located at 1415 First Ave. SW, according to Torrey Zimmerman, interim executive director of Habitat for Humanity Freeborn/Mower County.

“The ReStore was always intended to support the core mission for the organization, which is homebuilding and making safer home renovations,” Zimmerman said. “Really, the ReStore was a tool to raise funds for that effort. Over the years, the store hasn’t provided the level of support we would like to get from it. It was really the intent of the board to shut down the store, all the energy and resources going into running that facility and reappropriating that back into building safe and affordable homes in the community.”

Habitat for Humanity ReStores are nonprofit home improvement stores and donation centers that sell new and gently-used furniture, appliances, decor, building materials and other items to the public for lower than retail prices.

From the ReStore, the money made helps fund Habitat for Humanity’s various home building and renovation projects that assist people in the community who are in need of affordable homes, but are financially challenged.

Back in February 2014, Habitat for Humanity Freeborn/Mower also closed its Albert Lea store. The Austin store was originally located at a warehouse near Packer Arena before settling in its storefront within Sterling Shopping Center.

Staff and volunteers at the ReStore were notified about the decision and were starting the process of heavily marking down items to prepare for liquidating their inventory. Zimmerman said the objective was to get out of the storefront by the end of September 2019 or sooner, depending on how many of their items can be taken.

The number of volunteers has decreased over the years, but there were mostly five volunteers who did the bulk of rearranging the ReStore and stocking it with items as well as picking up donations with the trucks.

“They’ve been marking items down dramatically, and we’re pretty much starting with markdowns in the beginning and taper some things off,” Zimmerman said. “The last donations accepted is scheduled for Sept. 2. We’re going to take the bulk of September to do a graduated markdown process until it gets cheaper and cheaper until they’re gone.”

Once the Austin ReStore closes, then the closest ReStore will be in either Rochester or Owatonna. Zimmerman encouraged regular donors to take their items to the other locations and said the Freeborn/Mower affiliate has been in conversations with other local chapters to see if they’d be willing to take some inventory.

“We want our donors to have a place to continue to donate,” he said. “Repeat donors have been generous in being willing to donate things that benefit the mission of safe and affordable housing.”

Some of the main contributors to the ReStore closing was that the size and scale has grown to be “very, very expensive to run and to maintain,” Zimmerman explained. Scaling back means it was more financially conducive to promoting Habitat for Humanity’s main goal.

Seeing the decline in volunteerism and funding over the years, the executive director stated that many nonprofits across the country were experiencing similar difficulties in trying to maintain their operations.

“While the local affiliates are looking to reorganize, we’re facing the same thing other nonprofits are experiencing,” he said. “Volunteerism is down. Funding is down, and we have to make difficult decisions to continue to work toward our core mission. Again, our core mission isn’t to run a retail facility. The ReStore served as a tool to be able to provide additional funds and serve as that interface with the public. We’re really proud of the last five years. Changing times, means requiring most nonprofits to make some choices in the last few years, and we believe going forward that we’re going to make sure to keep doing what we’ve always been doing and more effectively.”

Although closing the ReStore may seem like a financial blow to those from the outside looking in, Zimmerman said it was more of a logical way to help with keeping Habitat for Humanity from taking operating expenses out of its other funding revenues.

“Again, it’s been a really positive experience, it’s just the reality is that it’s becoming extremely expensive to run the store,” he said. “We have a variety of income streams from really faithful donors. Everything from small scale to corporate, there’s some who significantly underwrite the work for those funds that are typically restricted to our core work and renovating work. Some other income streams are the result of the actual business we conduct, home mortgages, those kinds of things.”

During the winter months, the ReStore experiences a significant lag in customers, mostly due to seasonal items being donated and because many home renovation projects don’t take place during the colder seasons, meaning that whatever income generated during the slow months usually ended up offsetting the bills of keeping the store afloat.

Zimmerman explained that it’s generally up to the local affiliates of Habitat for Humanity to make a decision as to whether they should close or open a ReStore. He said that about 50 percent of Habitat for Humanity affiliates have a ReStore and half don’t. He went on to say that larger metro areas have had more of a base to continue to keep a ReStore running.

“Some places, especially in larger cities, make (ReStores) large enough and have a large enough volunteer base who live there to give them the supplies and resources to make it work,” Zimmerman said. “It’s hard in rural America and finding out how to make it work. The ReStore in Austin was open for five years, and that’s a strong testament of the volunteers who worked to make it successful.”

Rather than continue to operate a store that was more financially draining than supporting its mission, Habitat for Humanity Freeborn/Mower wanted to keep in perspective that the ReStore was not the main purpose for the organizatio, and that it was merely a tool to assist with its efforts.

“Really it’s more in our case that the cost of operating the ReStore was challenging with increased costs related to utilities and insurance and all those things are really much more expensive to operate the store,”Zimmerman said. “We have to take those funds and pay bills instead of pouring them into houses. It’s really a matter of what’s best in fulfilling our mission by not having to open a ReStore. It’s been a wonderful tool for a time, and times are changing. The board really believed, despite it being a difficult decision, that the best thing we can do to fulfill our purpose is to close the ReStore and refocus.”

Now that Habitat for Humanity will be closing its ReStore, the focus can be shifted back into its core mission of building safe, affordable homes for homeowners who may not otherwise be able to purchase a home in the first place.

The nonprofit plans on focusing more on home renovation projects for the next year, having just completed a new homebuild in June. So, there will be no new housing built in 2020 by Habitat for Humanity Freeborn/Mower.

“We’re planning on focusing on CHIP projects and we do that in Austin, and there’s another program called Brush with Kindness that focuses more than one home at a time, and can be a single moment in time like needing a home painted, or making the exterior of the house safer against the elements,” Zimmerman said. “Running the ReStore retail facility really took a large effort from volunteers and a decent sized staff can be converted into refocusing on building homes. Jumping into the ReStore was a great way to put a face to the community and gave volunteers real life and hands-on experience. It also was a really good thing for the community to repurpose items and donate items so that they don’t end up in a landfill somewhere that still has usable life in them.”

Now that the ReStore will no longer be a source of funds for Habitat for Humanity, the nonprofit will be exploring more events to help fundraise additional dollars for their various projects, such as silent auctions. Zimmerman said these campaigns are generally successful. One auction in 2018 raised $15,000 for Habitat for Humanity through the auctioning of refurbished furniture or craft items.

“It’s our intention to engineer more events and really appeal to the local citizens and businesses and organizations in getting Habitat’s vision out there for providing safe, affordable housing for people who need a little extra hand up in getting into homes,” he said. “Our homeowners tend to be proud of their homes and take really good care of them. At the end of the day, we want people to realize that this is not a charity effort. These people have dignity and value and that we should be helping them and helping us promote a strong bond at the community level. We’re just going to have to get creative in how we do things and find new ways to raise funds to keep it moving and promote community awareness.”

The Habitat for Humanity Freeborn/Mower affiliate was based inside the ReStore storefront and is currently searching for their next office space somewhere in Austin to continue operating within the community. For now, customers can make their last trips to the ReStore and continue to support Habitat for Humanity Freeborn/Mower in other ways for the foreseeable future.

“On behalf of the board, we want to thank the community of Austin and Freeborn and Mower County for their support for Habitat for Humanity over the years in its vision,” Zimmerman said. “We ask for continued support and we thank the community. We very much appreciate them.”