“Our motto? Our motto is to just help people right where they are,” says Randi Stauffer.

Around her is a small crowd of shoppers and hustling employees, kids giggling in the toy corner, the clinks of clothes hangers, and admiring grunts from the tool section.

Stauffer is the general manager of Baker City’s new People Helping People thrift store. It opened Oct. 5 at 2017 Main St., the third location in Eastern Oregon owned by Jeremiah Sprague of Cove.

“We had one that started six years ago in La Grande, and then that one progressively grew,” Stauffer said. “So we decided to open one in Pendleton.”

Baker City became the next goal.

“The Baker community has been asking us to move in, to help support the community,” Stauffer said, “and so we decided to open this one.”

The location should be familiar to some shoppers, as the former home of Sears.

Stauffer and her staff had been working for several days to prepare for the launch, and she decided to forego an official ceremony, notifying her employees the night before the Oct. 4 opening.

She did post on the store’s Facebook page about the opening.

People Helping People stores take donations from across the region, and Stauffer said the new Baker City store has items from a larger area.

“We had people bringing donations from Baker, they’d bring them to La Grande,” she said. “And so what we did is we brought a lot of the donations from La Grande over to the Baker community. We have Enterprise, Wallowa, multitudes of different areas in the community that all just donate to us, and so we share them with the stores.”

Stauffer said People Helping People works with a variety of community organizations.

“We help with the (Housing and Urban Development), we help with the jails, we help with the corrections, we do community service, we have volunteers and we also work with Shelter from the Storm, DHS, churches, care organizations,” she said. “We work with veterans, homeless people, recovery employment opportunities, local businesses, Community Connection and Eastern Oregon University and we also work with the DHS and the CHD and the care programs.”

The Baker City store’s inventory includes a variety of clothing, furniture and jewelry.

Stauffer and her staff are still setting up for receiving donations and will announce when they’re ready to handle donors.

“The most interesting donation is someone’s false teeth,” she said.

Stauffer says her faith was a driving factor in establishing thrift stores in the area, fostering community wherever she feels needed, and though she didn’t have a handy count of how many attended the opening day, she says it was a positive experience and counted each one as a blessing.

“We all just enjoyed every moment of it,” she said.

The shop will be open Mondays through Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.