Dec. 16. The Ada Jenkins Center’s financial assistance program has depleted its available funding and is temporarily closed.

Harold Rice

Harold E. Rice Jr., chief executive officer, says that since July, the center has served 92 families with rent, mortgage and utility payments, helping them remain in their homes and without interruption of their utility services. There was $127,000 budgeted for the fiscal year, which ends in June 2023.

“We have depleted our funds six months into our fiscal year,” he says.

“As a result of the unfortunate circumstance, we have decided to put a pause on financial assistance for only a few weeks because we’ve recently received some good news that more dollars will come our way at the beginning of 2023,” Rice says.

Rice said the center helped families financially during the pandemic with money from COVID relief funding.

“When all of our COVID relief funding dissolved for financial assistance, the need for this funding continued, so I decided to build this service in our annual budget starting last fiscal year,” Rice said.

“This year we budgeted $127,000 toward this effort from various funding sources and because of the tremendous need,” Rice wrote in an email. That was depleted in six months.

Anyone seeking assistance should check the Ada Jenkins website for updates.

If anyone wants to donate toward this effort, click here.