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2010 Service Trip to Scranton
Helping the homeless at the Church of the Good Shepherd, Scranton
Volunteers from St. Philip's and Trinity Buckingham will depart on the evening of Wednesday, June 16, 2010, and drive up to the Fatima retreat center in Dalton, Pa. The group will be there three nights, returning on Sunday after services at Good Shepherd Episcopal in Scranton, where they'll be working. The cost of the trip (for those staying over) is $38 per person per night. There is no cost for day-trippers. Lunch will be provided and the group will figure out dinners there. Those interested in participating should contact Tim Philpot.
In Lent of 2004, a group of volunteers at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Scranton decided to host a dinner for the homeless. Five years later, that small start has grown into a monthly meal for 80 to 100 people and an array of services for the homeless and working poor in the community including haircuts, health screenings, shoes and clothing, and toiletries and personal hygiene products.
In December 2008, the church was awarded a social outreach grant through the Diocese of Bethlehem's New Hope campaign that will provide $200,000 over a five-year period to improve the kitchen, add bathroom facilities, improve facilities for clothing distribution, create an emergency shelter in the undercroft of the church for bitterly cold winter nights and emergencies where families are displaced from their homes, and make room for a food bank in the shelter area.
Members of St. Philip's and Trinity Buckingham spent the week of Sunday, July 26, through Saturday, Aug. 1, 2009, working in Scranton to assist with this project. People were unable to travel to Scranton helped by donating toiletries that will be distributed at these dinners.
These volunteers scraped and painted walls in the kitchen and undercroft of the church, tore out an unused stage and built a wall in the area that will be used to distribute used clothing, sorted through donated clothing, and performed a variety of other chores at the church. They also helped serve dinner at the St Francis Soup Kitchen in Scranton.
A smaller group returned to Scranton in November.
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