In some ways, it feels as if space and time have slowed down lately while the need for help has sped up. Space is something we're all having to get used to, for the time being, as the coronavirus outbreak continues.
"Everybody wants to hug us," Dawn White-Fosdick said as she looked down at her shirt. "So now we're all wearing stickers that say, 'We love you, but please stay back five feet.'"
Those words that are tough to live by when all White-Fosdick wants to do is wrap her arms around everyone in need.
"We love our clients and we love each other," she said.
White-Fosdick runs Christian Assistance Ministry, or CAM, a San Antonio nonprofit that helps homeless and low-income people with food, prescriptions and even hygiene needs.
"We've always sort of operated sort of as an emergency room of social service," she said.
But now that emergency room is filling up. As smaller nonprofits close down out of caution, CAM is picking up the slack.
"CAM is feeding a little over 100 individuals every morning and that crowd seems to be getting larger almost every day," White-Fosdick said.
But while the number of people they are helping out spike, their volunteer pool is dropping.
"We've had to tell volunteers who are over 55 not to come down here. Almost 99% of the CAM volunteers are probably 70 and over, so to lose that population while we're in the middle of a crisis is major," she said.
"We're not asking for a lot of community volunteers to come down though because we're limiting how many clients can come down here," she continued "We're trying to kind of tell the community, 'You can still help us by making donations.'"
The group has listed exactly what it's in need of on its website, including food items and other needs that anyone looking to help can include in homemade care packages and hygiene kits.
The contributions, White-Fosdick says, can make a difference for a group that lives for helping those in need, especially in the toughest of times.
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