ALLENTOWN, Pa. — An organization dedicated to tackling homelessness in the Lehigh Valley, also aims to break the cycle.<\/p>\n
For 126 years, Allentown Rescue Mission has helped homeless men in crisis.<\/p>\n
Heather Schweizer is an associate in the Mission’s 8-week Transformation Program.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Every client who comes into my office has a unique and different story. We talk about anger management, we talk about biblical approaches to strongholds that they have on the mind, workforce development classes, different classes to help break that chronic homelessness,” Schweizer explained. “It’s teaching the tools that are needed that are lacking to help people get out of the survival mode and to try and make it on their own.”<\/p>\n
At 22 years old, Joshua is one of the Transformation Program’s youngest participants.<\/p>\n
“I started about 5 weeks ago,” Joshua told 69 News.<\/p>\n
Joshua had a complicated family situation and found himself homeless and without a job.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Say you can’t find your career and you fall apart, so you lose your job or you can’t find a good job, you don’t know what to do with your life, you fall onto addiction or substances, whatever it may be and you get back on your feet by having a place like this available,” Joshua stated.<\/p>\n
Over the course of the program, participants like Joshua take a series of classes teaching life skills and coping mechanisms, take on daily chores at the Mission and gain a sense of spirituality during evening chapel, all while finding community and their place within it.<\/p>\n
Joshua told us he’s especially fond of art and has found painting to be therapeutic. He says he’s optimistic about what the future holds.<\/p>\n
“When you graduate, you get to stay an extra 16 weeks and work on Clean Team or get your own job and save up a significant amount of money so that you can launch out into the world and hopefully have success. I believe that this is one of the only programs out there that can get somebody off the street for good,” Schweizer said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. — An organization dedicated to tackling homelessness in the Lehigh Valley, also aims to break the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164936,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[74338,119,121,120,5546,2347,391,74337,47,74336,175,22028],"class_list":{"0":"post-164935","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-addiction-recovery","9":"tag-allentown","10":"tag-allentown-headlines","11":"tag-allentown-news","12":"tag-allentown-rescue-mission","13":"tag-community-support","14":"tag-homelessness","15":"tag-life-skills","16":"tag-mental-health","17":"tag-transformation-program","18":"tag-workforce-development","19":"tag-youth-homelessness"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}