The Sixth Street Shelter Celebrates Families With Free Games, Food and Fun

ALLENTOWN – The Sixth Street Shelter, a program of Community Action Lehigh Valley, is celebrating its 30th Anniversary with a day of FREE family fun from 12-to-4 p.m. on Saturday, August 16, 2014, on the entire block of North Sixth Street between Turner and Chew Streets in Allentown, where the Shelter is located.

What better way to celebrate 30 years of helping to keep families together than by offering free family activities such as carnival games, prizes, food and fun? Hot dogs, beverages, popcorn, cotton candy, Tootsee the Clown, and a visit from Disney’s Frozen characters Elsa and Olaf are among the many events to take place. There will be a dunk tank, skee ball, a bounce house, bean bag toss, ring toss and many other games, events and plenty of prizes to celebrate the day.

Ever wanted to dunk Alan Jennings, Executive Director of Community Action? For a $30 donation, you can have a shot at 3 balls to throw at the tank to dunk Alan from 1:30-to-2 p.m. Other Shelter staff will be in the tank throughout the day as well.

A brief press conference will be held at 1 p.m. at which PA Senator Pat Browne and PA Representative Mike Schlossberg and others will be offering comments in honor of the Shelter’s 30 years of service to the community.

Established in 1984, the Sixth Street Shelter is the largest family shelter in the region. It consists of 5 buildings on North Sixth Street in Allentown, which contain 25 fully-furnished apartments. The Shelter is a transitional housing program designed to keep the entire family intact, while giving them the tools they need to end their homelessness during their 60-day stay. Each family has its own self-contained apartment, without having to share kitchen or bathroom facilities with others, as is often typical in traditional shelters.

“As tragic as homelessness is, it says something about this community that it can generate the resources necessary to feed and shelter more than 2,500 families, including over 5,000 children for the past 30 years,” said Dawn Godshall, Director of the Sixth Street Shelter. “We’re truly grateful for the generosity of our donors who support the families we serve. We wanted to thank the entire community by hosting a fun event for both our program participants and the neighborhood we’ve been a part of for three decades,” said Godshall.

In keeping with the theme of “30”, the Shelter will have a donation table at the event, which will be collecting items in groups of 30’s: 30 mops, 30 brooms, 30 can openers, etc. If you or your organization would like to organize a collection, or make a monetary contribution, please stop by our donation table the day of the event.

***

#alanjennings #mikescholssberg #dunktank #carnivalgames #Allentown #celebration #SixthStreetShelter #30years #patbrowne #family #homelessness