The Club has committed to staff the kitchen and shower attendant volunteer roles on the evening of March 23^rd at Bethlehem Emergency sheltering, hosted at Christ Church UCC on the corner of Center and Market streets in Bethlehem.  We will need to provide 4 to 8 volunteers to work in the kitchen, preparing and serving food, as well as 2 to 4 shower attendants to hand out towels and coordinate the scheduling of Men’s and Women’s showers.  Please contact Mark (Rotary@MarkWalter.net, 610-657-1467) or Deb Walter (deb.walter@yahoo.com, 610-657-0952) if you are interested in participating with the Club on this project.  Or, if you already have a volunteering account with BES and would like to join us on this date, you can log in and select your role for March 23^rd and choose Bethlehem Rotary as your sponsoring organization to credit your hours to the Club’s total.

Rotarian Kevin Cope has offered an opportunity to have his organization, Valor Clinic Foundation (valorclinic.org), provide the food we will serve.  We will be working out the details of this in the near future, but if Valor provides all the food, we will only need to provide volunteers to serve it from about 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. plus set-up and cleanup in the kitchen.  This could be either 4 – 6 people from 4:00 to 8:00, or 2 groups of 3 or 4 people each (from 4 to 6:30 and 5:30 to 8).  Additionally, we will need 1 male volunteer for the male shower and 1 female volunteer for the female shower.  The shower schedule runs from 5:30 to 9:15, and can also be split into shifts of 5 – 7 and 7 – 9, if needed.  Mark has worked the men’s shower several days this season and found it fairly easy to just cover both shifts, while helping Deb manage the kitchen during the setup and cleanup phases.

If Valor is not able to provide the entire meal, or if some Rotarians would prefer to provide food ourselves, the rules around this require that the food must be prepared in a “Food Safe” approved (commercial) kitchen.  This means that, unlike some of the times the Club has served BES in past years, we cannot cook at home and bring it in.  We either need to have cooked food provided by a restaurant or an organization approved to serve food (like Valor, Essentials Caf?, some churches, etc.), or if we want to provide “home-made” dishes, they must be cooked on-site in the BES kitchen.  We can bring in our ingredients and start cooking at 2 p.m. on the day we serve.  Exceptions to this include such things as baked goods (cakes, cookies, fruit pies); there’s a whole list we can discuss as applicable.

 Here are some of the basic duties of each role:

• Cooking – Bring in ingredients, cook food, prepare uncooked food (salads, fruit slices, etc.), portion food
• Setup – Turn on equipment, brew coffee, fill water jugs, set up return area, sanitize tables and counters
• Serving – count people served, plate food, provide silverware etc., serve food, move empty serving dishes to cleanup area
• Cleanup – Rinse and scrape pots, pans, plates, cups, glasses and silverware, run everything in dishwasher, clean tables and counters, take out garbage and recycling
• Shower attendant – ensure soap, body wash and shampoo are in showers, provide sanitizing spray to each showerer, hand out towel / wash cloth, announce 5 min warning and end of each shower time, call next showerer.