EASTON, Pa. – Tricia Vermilya is making it her mission to help fight homelessness in the Lehigh Valley.<\/p>\n
“Basically I just noticed a lot more homeless people in the community and I wanted to do something about it,” said Vermilya.<\/p>\n
The Aesthetics business owner organized the first-ever Hope for the Holidays event at Easton’s Sigal Museum on Saturday.<\/p>\n
“I knew it, all these people were involved and we turned it into this amazing event that we’re having here this evening,” said Vermilya.<\/p>\n
Money raised helps shelters in the area, including Safe Harbor Easton where Sarah Stehlin is the director of development.<\/p>\n
“It’s huge. It’s obviously been a really tough year. There’s a lot of nonprofits still recovering from the impacts of the Pennsylvania State Budget impasse, federal government shutdown and a lot of our folks, people we serve were very nervous during that time,” said Stehlin.<\/p>\n
Bethlehem Emergency Sheltering executive director Bob Rapp Jr. said recently half of the people the shelter has helped are experiencing homelessness for the first time.<\/p>\n
“Right now, currently we are averaging 61 folks in the shelter a night. The last couple of weeks we’ve been close to our 70 capacity almost every night,” said Rapp Jr.<\/p>\n
He said events like Hope for the Holidays are a big help.<\/p>\n
“This is really awesome. It’s wonderful for us because it gets us exposure in the community sometimes with folks who don’t even know we exist,” said Rapp Jr.<\/p>\n
Around $4,000 has been raised so far.<\/p>\n
People can donate to Safe Harbor Easton and Bethlehem Emergency Sheltering directly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EASTON, Pa. – Tricia Vermilya is making it her mission to help fight homelessness in the Lehigh Valley.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54143,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,232],"class_list":{"0":"post-54142","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-_homepage_top_stories","9":"tag-allentown","10":"tag-allentown-headlines","11":"tag-allentown-news","12":"tag-allentown-area"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54142","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=54142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}