Ronald McDonald House seeks help
Charity turns to hotels, community for a hand with facilities closed
After discovering COVID-19 had spread to an Orlando-area Ronald McDonald House in early July, the charity closed its three local homes for what it hoped would be a couple of weeks. But a month later, the region’s heightened infection rate has kept the houses shuttered, and the organization has turned to local hotels and generous donors to continue its work.
“Obviously it’s a challenge, but we’ve been able to fulfill our mission and continue to help these families that need to stay close to their sick or hospitalized child,” said Priya Aboul-hosn, a spokeswoman for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Central Florida. “We have to make sure that we’re protecting the health and safety of our families and our staff.”
The charity operates Ronald McDonald Houses at each of the region’s three major pediatric facilities — Orlando Health Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children, AdventHealth for Children and Nemours Children’s Hospital. Last year, the houses provided free lodging and meals to some 2,700 families whose critically ill children were undergoing treatment.
The first week in July, though, “there were positive cases of COVID within the houses,” Aboul-hosn said, declining to provide details because of what she characterized as privacy concerns. That led to the closure of all
its homes, though the nonprofit had vowed to re-evaluate the situation two weeks later.
When the virus continued to spread rapidly throughout the region, the organization conferred with the Florida Department of Health in Orange County, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Ronald McDonald House Charities global office in Chicago and opted against immediate reopening.
“You know, this is communal living,” Aboul-hosn said. “Ronald McDonald Houses have shared dining room and living rooms. So we made that difficult decision.”
The charity is spending about the same amount of money — on average, $104 a night for each family it helps — to pay for hotel rooms and meals, but the setting doesn’t allow for the emotional support the families find in a Ronald McDonald House, she noted.
The organization also has had to cut five open staff positions it had planned to fill and furlough five employees until the houses reopen. There’s no definitive date.
“After consulting with local, state and federal health officials, we have determined that there must be a 14-day decline in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations before any RMHs in Orlando reopen,” Lou Ann DeVoogd, the charity’s president and CEO, posted on Facebook. “Our current guest families will remain in hotels at no cost to them.”
On Monday, local health officials reported that infection rates and hospitalizations had started to flatten for Orange County.
Meanwhile, volunteers have been leading gift-card collections and fund-raising drives to help the Ronald McDonald House Charities during the pandemic. An Avalon Park resident, who posted about the need on her Facebook page, recently donated hundreds of dollars in gift cards and hundreds of bags of snacks for the families, Aboul-hosn said.
The organization also has been successful so far in transforming its fundraising events to online platforms. A virtual version of its annual trivia night contest, normally held at a downtown Orlando bar, raised $10,000 late last month.
Executives hope for similar results for the upcoming Appetite for the Arches event — in which top local chefs prepare dishes using only ingredients found at McDonald’s restaurants — even though it, too, will be virtual.
“It was supposed a chef ’s gala at the Rosen Shingle Creek in April,” AboulHosn said. “At the time, we thought certainly we could move it to August, and now it turns out, no, we still can’t. So we’ll have a Facebook livestream with some chef cooking demonstrations, a silent auction and, we hope, a lot of fun.”