Dorothy Day Center
The Dorothy Day Center is a charity organization that mostly serves food to the poor. On top of that though, the center also helps out with clothes, medical care, financial assistance, and provides housing at night for up to 150 people. About 95 percent of the food served at the Dorothy Day Center was donated by grocery stores, bakeries, farmers, and other organizations of the sort, and the meals are served by volunteers and a staff that works on the site. On any given weekday, the center will serve about 550 meals, and on the weekends they will serve 750 meals per day. The Dorothy Day Center serves breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday, with additional snack like sweet roles and coffee during the day. I have helped out at the Dorothy Day Center on and off for the past two years now, and it is quite an experience. When I have been there we serve a pancake breakfast on Saturday, and the people that come through are just not homeless men. I have served men, women, the elderly and children. There are people who come through the lines that suffer from physical and mental disabilities. We only serve breakfast from 9:00 to 9:30, and for that half an hour the line is almost constantly full, and by the end of the half an hour we start to run out of food, and so we give the people extra sausage or an extra roll, whatever we have left, until it is all gone. Sometime when I've been there we have been able to serve seconds to people, other times not everyone even gets their full first serving. It was quite an eye-opener for me because I never thought there was that much poverty in my own city of St. Paul, because I never really noticed it before. And when you leave your glad you could make some kind of a difference, and at the same time it extremely sadden that you couldn't have done more. The Dorothy Day Center does have a staff that works there full time but it depends on donations and volunteers to keep the place running. So I encourage anyone who has a day to give to go down to the Dorothy Day Center and help out. It is just in Downtown St. Paul, not too far away, and any help they get does make a big difference.