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Ten Years of Friday Clinic

September 5, 2025

Last week, our staff gathered at Café Momentum to celebrate 10 years of our Friday Clinic. Each Friday, we hold a walk-in, fully integrated clinic to serve people experiencing homelessness. Fridays are my favorite day of the week and it was an honor to celebrate with the people who make that clinic possible each week.

Nearly 11 years ago, a group of staff, volunteers, and community partners started having conversations about health care for people experiencing homelessness. We kept asking the question, “are people getting the care they need?” While we learned of other health care organizations serving this community well, barriers to access persistent. Community advocates spoke about the challenge for keeping appointments in advance and arriving on time. They spoke of how difficult it was to have to keep track of multiple visits on different days to receive mental health and primary care. We learned that people didn’t see the value of even free care if there was no option to afford the treatment or medication recommended. It made perfect sense and yet the solutions felt far beyond the bounds are healthcare as we knew it.

In response to our learning, we piloted a walk-in clinic one Friday in August. Staff donated to provide the first shipment of medication so that patients could leave with any medicine they needed. I saw patients that day alongside a volunteer primary care provider and Dr. Boswell, our amazing volunteer psychiatrist. I still remember the three patients I saw that day. One left yelling at us and I wondered if she would ever come back (she did); another told me a story of spending years on death row following a murder conviction and I wondered if that story was at all true (it was); and one was a diabetic in desperate need of insulin but had nowhere to store it and I asked myself if it’s possible to use insulin when you are sleeping outside (it is). Of these three original patients, one remains an active patient a decade later, one was a regular patient until his death last year at the age of 86, and one spent 6 months with us until he transitioned into permanent housing.

By then end of 2016, Friday clinic incorporated primary care, dental, and mental health and had grown to every Friday. We continue to add services from case management and housing partnerships to care packages and lunch. Since that first clinic, we have cared for 2807 unique patients referred from shelters, ministries, churches, and agencies throughout the metro region. Most incredibly, nearly two thirds of patients seen on Fridays return for ongoing care. In 2019, with the help of some academic partners, we interviewed 20 patients to understand why they returned to Good Samaritan. Several themes emerged from this study. People said they returned because their lack of housing impacted their health and they experienced improvements in their health. They spoke of the comprehensive services and the ability to see multiple providers in the same way. They spoke of being treated with respect and dignity. However, the last two themes were those that took me most by surprise. Patients talked about how staff members had become like family and friends to them and how they experience the presence of God at Good Samaritan.

While it would be easy to tell only a story of success, I want to acknowledge that this decade of work has also been very hard. We have been on a constant journey of learning as we understand the housing landscape in Atlanta and our role in helping people access the help they need. We navigated the closure of Peachtree Pine shelter where many of our patients were staying and remained open throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The Good Sam staff have managed constant change and taken on roles outside of their traditional job descriptions. Most importantly, they have held the trauma of our patients’ stories and lived experience and found hope and compassion over and over again.

While challenging, working each Friday is also an incredible gift. Each week, I see the best of humanity from our staff and volunteers to the organizations who partner with us to the grace, compassion, and resiliency shown by our patients. We are reminded that issues like poverty, homelessness and illness are our burden to share and that none of us are ever far from experiencing these traumas. Our certified peer specialist, Marcia, once told me that she would remove her shoes at the clinic because she was on holy ground. I think of that every single Friday. Psalm 34:18 says “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; he saves those whose spirits are crushed.” It is holy ground.

I am deeply thankful for the many who make Friday clinic possible. To our donors whose gifts allow us to provide free services; to our partners for trusting us with your friends, neighbors, and clients; to our patients who share their lives with us in ways that model grace and resiliency. But most of all, I am thankful for our team of staff and volunteers who have served, given, and loved. May you continue to love even when it is hard. In the words of one of our patients:

“I was able to sit down with my doctor, who has become a friend. Who has looked at me not as a broken man, not as a homeless man, but as a human being.”

We cannot fix everything. Alone, we will never be enough for the trauma and hardship facing our patients. But we can always love them, we can always choose to see them not as the world has labeled them, but as God sees them: whole and worthy.

Breanna Lathrop

Chief Executive Officer
Good Samaritan Health Center

 

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