BETHLEHEM, Pa. – One of the Lehigh Valley’s few overnight winter shelters wants to serve its guests throughout all seasons.
Keeping Bethlehem Emergency Sheltering’s facility on Market Street open throughout the year would give its guests a better chance at making their stays there short, according to those who run it.
BES will welcome up to 70 men and women starting Sunday evening; those who come can spend every night there – with beds reserved for guests who stay consecutive nights – through April.
But “people need a place to sleep” and find support when the winter is over, too, according to Brian Sweeney, who was recently promoted to be the shelter’s executive director.
“That is the biggest gap: for six months out of the year, we're telling people, ‘We hope we don't see you again, but if you need us in six months, you're more than welcome to come back,’” Sweeney said.
Guests who stay at the shelter can get a nightly hot meal and a warm shower several times a week.
And those who are looking for it can find help putting the pieces together, as the shelter partners with many service providers.
But that process takes a lot of time. Guests can spend a month or more trying to get an ID that allows them to sign up for housing services and fill out applications, Sweeney said.
Jason Addy
By the time the shelter closes in the spring, “they might be two or three steps away from being able to sustain themselves, and now the thing that is helping to sustain them is disappearing,” Sweeney said.
Sending people back out to live wherever they can find shelter or a camp often erases months of progress made during their stay in the winter shelter, according to the BES' new leader.
“We're watching people get so close, so many years in a row, and then it's time for us to close and they come back to us the next season with most of that progress lost,” Sweeney said.
But keeping the shelter open year-round will require a significant uptick in support from elected officials.
Bethlehem Emergency Sheltering has a budget of about $500,000 to cover its six months of winter operations. Much of that comes from private donations and grants, according to board member Robert Hintze.
And about 700 volunteers help the shelter’s small staff get through the season. Volunteers last year bought and prepared every meal – almost 10,000 – and cleaned up after serving. They also chip in with groundskeeping, repairs and small projects.
“We are very blessed in what our volunteer base does and is capable of doing,” Sweeney said.
Without that outpouring of support from the community each year, the shelter would have to reduce its staff and services, Hintze said.
“We’re here this season on a hope and a prayer,” he said. “If we were to rely exclusively on government funding – we would not be open for six months.”
BES is always looking for donations and volunteers.
Running a year-round shelter would likely cost at least $1 million a year, according to Hintze.
Bethlehem Emergency Sheltering gets about $12,000 in funding from the city and $20,000 from Northampton County, Hintze said. He wants local officials to consider how much value the shelter is adding to the community by reducing costs for many of its services.
“From the city standpoint, you have the police, but you also have fire and EMS not responding to people sleeping outside in January, February, and freezing,” Hintze said.
Sweeney highlighted the city’s status as a tourist destination – with the nation’s best Main Street, Christkindlmarkt and Musikfest, and a UNESCO World Heritage site – as further reason for public investment in a year-round shelter.
State officials have helped secure millions of dollars for the shelter, but those funds can only be spent on the long-term project to upgrade the facility’s kitchen and dining hall, sleeping areas, and bathrooms. The project will also add an elevator to make the shelter more accessible.
Guests who use the shelter now must be able to climb stairs to reach its many spread-out rooms.
Those renovations would likely take at least two offseasons’ worth of work to complete, “plus or minus the red tape,” Hintze said.
That funding is being administered by city officials, who will submit plans and disperse money on behalf of Bethlehem Emergency Sheltering.
Many of those renovations would be needed before the shelter opens in the summer, when it gets “brutally hot” in the former Sunday school where the shelter operates, according to BES board chairman Rodney Conn.
“Being open as a shelter during July or August right now would probably be more dangerous than letting them sleep outside,” he said.