Bethlehem Emergency Sheltering<\/a>, volunteers serve meals and set up beds for everyone who needs to come inside.<\/p>\n“It’s an emergency winter shelter for adult males and females they come to us from a variety of places but mostly right here in the Valley,” Robert T. Rapp Jr, Executive Director of Bethlehem Emergency Sheltering says.<\/p>\n
Wednesday night, 54 people stayed here, and with colder temps setting in, the shelter expects even more these coming weeks.<\/p>\n
“I’m imagining that probably with the change of weather next week those numbers will keep increasing,” Rapp says.<\/p>\n
Capacity for the shelter sits at 70 beds.<\/p>\n
“There are a good number of new folks coming in this year so I would say that yes we’ll be at we’ll be at capacity fairly quickly,” Rapp added.<\/p>\n
Rapp says the cold isn’t the only reason more people are showing up.<\/p>\n
“Last year during the shelter season almost half of the folks that came and sheltered with us were new to homelessness and that’s a direct effect from the housing crisis and the price of rent,” he says.<\/p>\n
Guests here get a hot meal and medical care, and it doesn’t have to be just a one-night stay.<\/p>\n
“Folks that come here to shelter if you have a bed with us tonight you have available the same bed tomorrow night so you can leave some of your belongings here, so they don’t have to carry everything out on the street,” Rapp explains.<\/p>\n
Rapp says the shelter could hit its 70 bed capacity within week, and hopes the community will lend a hand to help meet the growing need.<\/p>\n
“We have a wish list on the website<\/a> at all times we also have volunteer opportunities so you can sign up and someone will be in contact with you about those volunteer opportunities,” Rapp says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BETHLEHEM, Pa. – Its only early November, but the temperatures and wind are already pushing more people to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[214,153,155,154,1391],"class_list":["post-27349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-bethlehem-area"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27349","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=27349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}