Charitable organizations now offering services on weekends

Friday, Sept. 24, 1999 | 10:16 a.m.

Because being homeless is a seven-day-a-week condition, charitable organizations are responding to the needs of the poor by offering services on weekends that once were available only on weekdays.

"For about a year we have opened our Day Resource Center on Saturdays and Sundays, and it has worked out very well," Sumner Dodge, spokesman for the Clark County Salvation Army, said.

"We had gotten several requests from homeless people saying that they needed help on those days. You don't stop being homeless on weekends."

The Salvation Army's Day Resource Center serves a number of purposes, from a message center that takes calls from potential employers and family members to a facility where the homeless can do laundry and take showers.

Year after year, the Salvation Army provides record numbers of homeless people with services ranging from meals to emergency shelter.

"It was slow at our Family Services office from January through April, but in the last four months we have been seeing people at record levels," Dodge said. "We have provided many food boxes and helped people get work cards and health cards."

While agencies like the Salvation Army have shortages just about everywhere, they sometimes get a break with longstanding problems because of the public's generosity.

For example, canned food supplies that generally have been severely depleted by summer have not been a problem this year for the Salvation Army.

"It has been a miracle," Dodge said. "Last year by July 8 we ran out of food. But last Christmas we got 400,000 food items that have pulled us through. This November the Boy Scouts hope to collect 330,000 canned goods to go over the 2 million-item mark in their 12th year of the program. Last year they collected 256,800 food items for us."

Still in many other areas there are significant shortages.

"We expect to help 18,000 people this Christmas -- about 1,000 more than last year," Dodge said. "This concerns us because, for the first time last year, we fell short of providing gifts for all of the children who were signed up for our Angel Tree program."