A Day in the Life at Midtown Assistance Center
By: Tommy Rivers
On a routine Thursday morning or staff begins arriving between 8:00 and 8:30. We come in through the church’s back door and step up into the basement hall that leads to the Atlanta First Day School and our administrative offices. Walking down the hall, we hear our Midtown Assistance (MAC) phones, already ringing. People are calling for help a good hour before we open. The phones ring throughout the morning and by the end of assistance we will have answered over one hundred calls.
The first hour flies by while we check out the day’s appointment schedule and work on our individual Midtown Assistance projects – networking, fundraising and coordinating food drives, to name a few. Around 9:00AM people start buzzing the front door intercom. Volunteers log-in and receive their assignments. They talk with and serve clients, one on one, in cubicles that line our narrow interior hall. This little hall plays an important role at Midtown Assistance Center; it connects the director’s office, the administration office, the cubicles and the waiting room to the clothing closet and the food pantry. It connects us with people in crises. In some way, our hall literally and figuratively represents the path we travel to a shared place with our clients.
Midmorning: Our phones ring continuously now while clients arrive and fill the waiting room. Noticeably, the pace quickens. Grocery bags crackle and whoosh. Staffers and volunteers rush them to clients as some of us reassure new arrivals with welcoming words and ice water. Coworkers whiz past each other in the narrow hall. Like an unwelcomed visitor, the peculiar smell of 90 degree heat combined with downtown pollution wafts up from the side walk whenever we open the door. Oddly, this early heat wave causes some of us to muse on how recently we were doling out winter coats and jackets. Summer will bring with it, its own kind of challenges. Food donations fall off and requests for light clothing and fans return. We had thirty appointments on today’s schedule; two rescheduled so we saw twenty-eight clients, providing each of them with at least one of our services. As one woman was leaving her assistance appointment, I heard her tell another in the waiting room, “If MAC hadn’t helped me today I would be going home to a house with no lights and nothing to feed my children. I’m so thankful because now I can cook dinner for the kids, pay my rent and not wind up homeless.”
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Since March 19th, Midtown Assistance Center has been working remotely to provide rent, utility, MARTA and food assistance to clients in need. While our building is not currently open, we continue to serve clients and work to prevent hunger and homelessness during this current crisis. To make a donation, please visit our donation page or send a check to: Midtown Assistance Center, 30 Porter Place, Atlanta, GA 30308