It’s cold.  It is Christmas.  And the local men’s homeless shelter needs volunteers to remain open.

“The primary need is for overnight volunteers for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday prior to Christmas and for the days between Christmas and the new year,” said Dr. Ron Cava, senior minister at The First Baptist Church of Henderson, NC.  Cava serves as the chairman of the board of directors for Community Partners of Hope, which runs the shelter.

To volunteer email cpofhope@gmail.com or contact Jane King (Volunteer Coordinator) at 252-432-9494.  Volunteers need to be male.

There is a calendar on the Community Partners of Hope website, and you can see what times are needed.

The average attendance this season has been about six men per night.  Some are moving through the area and others are being helped by the shelter to get on their feet.  “The overnight shift is just really — I don’t mean to minimize it because it is very important, but we need warm, male bodies who will come and be there and in the case of some sort of emergency could pick up a phone and call for help,” Cava said.

At this time it also sounds like from what Dr. Cava is saying that the fallback options to staff the overnight times have been unusually over extended, meaning a shelter closure is possible on nights when no overnight volunteers are able to be scheduled.

Numerous area churches take various weeks of time to staff the shelter with volunteers, but it takes community-wide participation from individual volunteers as well to fill all the time.

Most nights at the shelter, a few men needing a place to sleep come in at 9:00 p.m. after having already received food and the option of a hot shower by the shelter’s intake crew.  It’s lights out at 10:00 p.m.  “Overnight volunteers stay until 6:30 the next morning, and the men know the routine to get things cleaned up in the morning and then have to be off the premises at that time,” said Cava.

Two of the shelter managers, who received much praise from Cava, are former occupants of the shelter.  Darryl Jones and Kenny Blackwell are both former homeless people.  Cava said, “They have both been there.  They know where these men are and how they’re feeling.  They’ve both succeeded at full recovery.  Darryl came through our shelter two years ago, spent a year in our transitional home and is out on his own doing really, really well and is giving back.”

Cava said, “For some reason, we’ve had a lot of our volunteers from previous years to age out, have had physical problems, and our volunteer ranks have been thinned in the last year pretty dramatically, and we have not been very successful in replenishing them even though we are constantly reaching out to — our core base is our churches.”

One of the things the shelter would like to do soon is increase its funding.  For example, it may be impossible for an individual or a church or other group to physically volunteer at the shelter, but it may be possible, according to Cava, for this same individual or group to help fund the shelter, which would then hire the required overnight personnel.

“It would be immoral in my opinion to know we are about to have frozen precipitation, to know it’s going to be 30 degrees and a man has no other place to go, and we’re going to have to say sorry, we can’t open the shelter because we don’t have volunteers,” Cava said.

To be a volunteer “you have to be able to smile, say good evening, you have to be able to sit in a recliner and watch them sleep,” Cava said.  If there are two volunteers, each can take turns and get a little rest as well.  “It’s not baby sitting.  These are grown men, who for a variety of reasons find themselves in the circumstances they are in and need some help,” he said.  The rules are posted and gone over at check in by the intake staff.

Cava is passionate about this ministry.  “We know the story of Mary and Joseph and our Lord being born in a cave instead of in a warm environment, and I just can’t bring myself to think about these men not having somewhere safe and warm to sleep just before we celebrate the birth of our Savior.”