For two days this week, patients at the Coweta Samaritan Clinic asked the front desk whether the clinic had any toiletry kits.

Staff had an answer ready.

"We've literally been saying, 'Rotary's coming on Wednesday,'" said Kelly Hines, the clinic's executive director.

On Wednesday, September 16, the Rotary Club of Newnan moved its weekly lunch meeting from Newnan Country Club to the clinic at 137 Jackson Street. Members worked down a row of tables filling 165 bags, each with shampoo, soap, deodorant, toothpaste, and three rolls of toilet paper. Clinic staff had already told several patients to come back that afternoon to pick one up.

A $2,000 district grant from Rotary District 6900 and The Rotary Foundation paid for the supplies, and the contents came straight from the clinic's wish list, said Melissa Payton, the club's service projects chair. The clinic expects the bags to last about two and a half months.

"Thank you, Kelly, for letting us come and love on you guys a little bit," Payton said as the packing began.

Club members have packed toiletry kits for the clinic at their meetings since 2019, and the club has supported the clinic with community grants for more than a decade.

"We are the free doctor's office for uninsured adults in Coweta County," Hines said.

The clinic, which marks 15 years of seeing patients this fall, serves Coweta County residents 19 and older who have no health insurance and a household income at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Volunteer specialists hold clinics in the building; a gastroenterologist was seeing patients during the Rotary visit. Piedmont Newnan, City of Hope, American Health Imaging, and physician offices across the area see clinic patients in their own offices at no charge.

Hines said that the network provided just over $13 million in free care last year to about 507 patients. The clinic has already passed that patient count in 2026 and expects to reach close to 550.

"The need is not going anywhere as things get more expensive, like toiletries, as people lose their jobs, as just day-to-day life gets hard," she said.

Many of the clinic's patients, Hines said, earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford coverage through the Affordable Care Act.

"There's nothing more rewarding, I think, than watching our patients come in here and just restoring their hope, their dignity," she said. "A lot of them, they don't even know how to make eye contact at first."

The clinic runs on an operating budget of about $800,000 a year, all of it raised from the community, with no government grants. Hines named two needs. New patients now wait about five months for a first appointment, and that wait has been growing. The clinic also needs volunteer dentists for the on-site dental clinic it opened in 2025, with the goal of having one in the building Monday through Thursday.

"We need dentists. We need volunteer dentists," she said, and she asked anyone visiting their own dentist to ask whether they volunteer at the clinic.

"If you ever doubt or question, am I making a difference in this community or this world? You absolutely are," Hines told the Rotarians.

The Rotary Club of Newnan meets Wednesdays at noon at Newnan Country Club.