ATLANTA — Organizers of one of Atlanta’s most beloved traditions, the annual Hosea Williams Thanksgiving Dinner for everyone in need, are bracing for unprecedented crowds on Thursday.
And this year, for the first time, there will be no sit-down dinner.
But dinner will be served for the 50th year in a row -“to go,” this time.
The president of Hosea Helps, Elisabeth Omilami, said that after decades of serving those in need, the need now is more staggering than ever.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said Sunday.
Omilami and teams of volunteers are rushing to assemble thousands of Thanksgiving meals “to go,” to give away to those who line up on Thursday outside the Georgia World Congress Center and also to deliver to homeless shelters and to the streets.
The food boxes are replacing -- during this pandemic year, anyway -- the annual, indoor sit-down holiday dinners that her father, the late Civil Rights leader Hosea Williams, founded 50 years ago.
This year, “we don’t know, we don’t know how long the line for food is going to be,” Omilami said.
She said that this year, so many families are in desperate need, requests for groceries and rent-assistance year-round have increased some 300 percent over last year, while donations are down 40 percent to 50 percent of what they were last year.
“I’ve gotten Facebook posts and emails from people that said, they’ve never been in a food line before,” Omilami said. “So you take what we normally would see, times 300 percent, and then you put on top of that the fear of the pandemic, the isolation, and the anxiety. And so you’re seeing people who just need to see a smiling face.”
Volunteers, she said, are still needed to sign up on the Hosea Helps website, to pack the food, now, and then to distribute it on Thursday -- enough food in each box to last a family for two or three weeks. Plus they will be delivering one-time meals to shelters, and along the streets of Atlanta that many homeless call home.
The mission: continue to minister to the hungry and homeless, just as Hosea Williams personally did every year from 1970 until his death in 2000 -- an enduring and endearing Atlanta tradition that is finding a way to keep going another year.
Thursday morning, beginning at 10 a.m., volunteers will begin distributing food boxes outside the Georgia World Congress Center on Andrew Young International Boulevard in downtown Atlanta. Recipients can drive or walk up.
“There was no way in the world we were going to let this 50th anniversary go by without saying to the public, we’re here,” Omilami said. “They need the food. They need the support. But people need to know that they’re not alone. They need to know there’s someplace they can go to feed their families... They need to know that we’re not closed.”
She said they also need to know that, the day after Thanksgiving, her organization will re-stock and continue distributing food as well as rent assistance as it has throughout every year.