Ron Potvin, CEO of The Store Next Door, sits in his car Friday in the Starbucks parking lot, reviewing a shopping list of items to deliver to Auburn food pantries for McKinney-Vento eligible children in the Auburn School District. The organization is shifting to a mobile approach, bringing food, sleeping bags and supplies directly to students rather than requiring them to visit a central location. Potvin often uses his car and Starbucks as his office, heading inside the coffee shop to spread out paperwork when he needs a desk. Andree Kehn/Sun Journal

AUBURN — The Store Next Door is now bringing basic resources to homeless youth in Auburn, marking a major expansion for the nonprofit since it began its life as a small effort in Lewiston three years ago.

When the nonprofit’s chief operating officer, Ron Potvin, took a look at the homeless student numbers in Auburn, he decided it was time to lend a helping hand to Lewiston’s sister city.

“In a 10-year period, the homeless student population (in Auburn) went from 60 to 240,” Potvin said. “I said ‘oh my goodness, what’s happening here?'”

The organization began as a small effort in Lewiston High School three years ago, providing food, clothes, personal hygiene items and educational counseling for homeless youth in the public school system. Their mission was simple: to give kids the very basics every child needs, whether they have a home or not. Even with steady growth since 2021, the Store Next Door has stuck by its core mission.

“We realized last year that there was a significant amount of families needing help. Our charter is about homeless students. We’re actually an educational effort, not a social service one,” Potvin said. “Our goal is to keep these kids in school through graduation.”

The effort now helps almost 500 students in the area. “We’re almost breaking 500,” Potvin said. “It’ll be over 700 soon,” he added.

“When you see the number, it’s really hard to ignore that there’s that many children in need,” said the nonprofit’s Auburn director, Rebecca Linscott. “That’s a number that most people think it’s big enough to want to donate and contribute in some sort of way.

“Families started showing up asking for help,” she said. “We let Lewiston (School Department) know we don’t have the resources to take care of families in need. In Lewiston, it’s a 24% poverty rate. That’s a lot of families. Do we turn people away? If we can help in a minimal way, we’ll help, but we make the effort to refer and connect them with agencies that can help instead.”

In just one month since extending its reach to Auburn, the organization has seen an outpouring of support from community and donors alike.

“Honestly, we don’t even try,” Potvin said. “People call us up randomly. There is an amazing spirit in Lewiston-Auburn communities. If it’s right and they feel good about it, they just keep it coming.”

“It’s not that child homelessness is a feel-good situation, but rather people feel committed to that. They feel that their money will go towards something that will make a big difference,” Linscott added.

“Our children, they’re always moving towards Lewiston or they’re moving back to Auburn. We’ve had kids who come back four years later,” Linscott said. “We just want to make sure that those kids are still getting services even if they transfer schools,” Linscott said. Their Auburn work will “act as some sort of baseline for them to get through transitioning, knowing wherever they go they’ll have that level of support to keep them in school.”

At first, the Store Next Door’s finding came through a small network established by teachers and parents. In just four years, the network has grown so much, with donations now coming from out of state.

“Every now and then you’ll have a corporate sponsorship that prefers to support the school system directly,” Potvin explained. “Others will prefer to support us because we literally take money and divide it up into resourcing. We do the food, the clothing, personal hygiene, educational materials. It goes directly to kids.”

The Store Next Door operates with minimal overhead to cut costs. “We do it with a stranglehold on expenses,” Potvin said. “We don’t have a location, we don’t have an office, we are a mobile unit of board members that service the community, working out of schools.”

“Our accountant’s building is where we have all our official mail sent,” Potvin said. “Then we have our bank and that’s it. We’ve been able to reduce any administrative costs through this. We don’t need a fancy office.”

The nonprofit is working on a program to educate the homeless youth it services. “We don’t want them graduating and becoming homeless adults. We want to see what we can do to get them to be even-keeled members of society who are self-sufficient. That’s a big thing for us. That’s a long-term expansion goal,” Potvin said.

The program would teach them where they can go to get housing, health care services and “any counseling they may need,” Linscott added. 

With help from Androscoggin Bank, financial education is set to be a part of this extensive program. “We’re focusing on seniors, so they understand things like checking accounts, savings accounts, interest rates, credit cards, credit establishment, investment accounts, and so forth down the line,” Potvin said.

“Our theory is that it doesn’t stop at Lewiston-Auburn, that there may be a significant number in neighboring school departments.” he said. “Part of our future plan is to basically be the resource center to help all of the students, as many as we can, in all of the districts in the local area for now.”