History

The Macdonald Center is named for Maybelle Clark Macdonald, a compassionate community member with a heart for the poor and homeless. It was started by Father Richard Berg, who had been appointed pastor to the St. Vincent de Paul Downtown Chapel. To determine how best to help the people in Old town, he commissioned a study which showed that isolation is the critical factor in the lives of the people living in single room occupancy (SRO) hotels. He began sending out volunteers in teams of two to visit people living in the 22 SRO hotles in the area. Visiting volunteers found disabled people in need of assisted living care living alone in SROs. In 1997, with a generous lead gift from Maybelle Clark Macdonald, he spearheaded a fund raising campaign to build an assisted living facility for people who are on Medicaid (to be on Medicaid, a person must have little available funding and be seriously disabled.) Ground was broken on the new facility in 1998 and it opened on August 26, 1999. The Macdonald Center now serves over 350 people per week, 54 of whom live in the assisted living facility.

The Macdonald Center was founded for four purposes:

1. To assist the poor, dual-diagnosed mentally ill persons in downtown Portland;
2. To empower volunteers and interns to serve these chronically-ill poor;
3. To provide research on the impact of personal care in the urban setting;
4. To build a sense of community among the neighborhood hotel residents, agencies and health care facilities.

This new Center, located in the basement of the Downtown Catholic Chapel, continued to be a place of hospitality and welcome where people of any age could find a safe atmosphere and help in the mornings. Our principal principle mission, however, was to reach out to people living downtown in more than 20 low-income residential hotels.

On April 1, 1992 the Macdonald Center began operations as a not-for-profit corporation. In that year we received a grant from the Commission on National and Community Service affirming our mission to care for the forgotten in the heart of our city of Portland and to educate volunteers, many of them university students, to address issues of urban poverty and illness.