Georgia woman raises thousands for Atlanta 'home away from home'

ATLANTA - The pandemic has left Atlanta's two Atlanta Ronald McDonald Houses with hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra bills.

To allow guest families the space they need to physically distance, the non-profit is housing a limited number of families on its two campuses and paying for other families to stay in local partner hotels.

In 2021, the two facilities hosted 2,311 families of hospitalized children.

But paying the extra hotel bills and safety measures have been costly.

Since the start of the pandemic, a spokeswoman for the Atlanta Ronald McDonald Houses says they have spent an extra $660,000 on hotel costs for families, $3,000 on PPE and about $3,500 on boxed meals for guests.

Last summer, Laura Lee Mason of Hiram, Georgia, stepped up to help.

Mason stayed at the Atlanta Ronald McDonald House on the campus of Emory University more than a decade ago.

"I was working at IHOP, and I dropped everything," she remembers.

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Back in 2010, her now 11-year-old son Mason George was having trouble breathing.

So, she brought him, to Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston to see a specialist.

"I went to Sibley Heart Center, and they rushed him into immediate surgery with pulmonary artery sling with tracheal stenosis," Mason says. "His pulmonary artery was wrapped around his trachea.  So, he had 19 surgeries and 96 procedures."

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For the first three weeks, Laura Lee Mason slept in the parents' room at Children's, until a hospital social worker told her about a kind of home-away-from-home for the families of hospitalized children less than a mile away.

At Ronald McDonald Houses, families pay what they can.  

Mason couldn't pay, so she stayed for weeks for free.

"They took me in," she remembers. "I had not a dollar to my name. I didn't have anything. 

They fed me, had comfortable beds.  It was just, home. It was absolutely home."

Over the years, as her son has recovered and grown, and Laura Lee Mason has ventured into real estate, she has thought a lot about the Ronald McDonald House.

"I was like, 'You know, I really need to give back,'" she says. "It's been weighing on my heart. And, then COVID hit, and COVID has hurt this place very, very badly. They needed help. So, I decided this year, I'm going to donate 10% of my proceeds to the Ronald McDonald House."

She and a client raised the first $30,000.  

Then, they teamed up with the two Ronald McDonald Houses to raise $67,000.

"We raised enough to support literally 662 families for a whole night," Mason says.

This is her way of saying thank you for her son, Mason.

"Had it not been for them, he would not be here," she says.  "It gave me the strength.  It gave me the courage, the rest.  It literally saved his life."

Laura Lee Mason is already planning another fundraiser for the Atlanta Ronald McDonald Houses this year, hoping to raise $100,000. 

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