{"id":70639,"date":"2025-12-25T23:27:05","date_gmt":"2025-12-25T23:27:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/70639\/"},"modified":"2025-12-25T23:27:05","modified_gmt":"2025-12-25T23:27:05","slug":"more-than-a-meal-volunteers-transform-reading-shelter-for-christmas-night-reading-area","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/70639\/","title":{"rendered":"More than a meal: Volunteers transform Reading shelter for Christmas night | Reading Area"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>READING, Pa.- On Thursday night at Opportunity House in Reading, Christmas feels like family.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s a really special day,\u201d said Ariana Austin.<\/p>\n<p>Members of St. Francis Church in Robesonia were on site cooking, serving, and donating the meal.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe had these volunteers come in today for dinner and they donated a lot of cereal, a lot of blankets, stuff that we desperately needed,\u201d Austin said.<\/p>\n<p>The shelter was transformed into something more than just a place to stay.<\/p>\n<p>Pam Sweigart is one of the volunteers helping make it happen. She\u2019s been doing this kind of work for nearly 30 years.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ll probably serve another 80 here. So we brought chili, and I\u2019ve added cookies and I\u2019ve added oranges and Kathy made mac and cheese and we have cornbread,\u201d Sweigart said.<\/p>\n<p>For the people staying at Opportunity House, the impact goes beyond the food.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou can feel a sense of family\u2026 even if you don\u2019t have family with you,\u201d Austin said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa.- On Thursday night at Opportunity House in Reading, Christmas feels like family. \u201cIt\u2019s a really special&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70640,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[214,128,130,129,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-70639","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-reading","8":"tag-_homepage_top_stories","9":"tag-reading-city","10":"tag-reading-city-headlines","11":"tag-reading-city-news","12":"tag-reading-area"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70639","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=70639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}