Close your eyes and imagine for a moment you as a parent tucking your children in bed on a cold winter's night with warm blankets on a comfy mattress.  Now, picture the child that sleeps that same night on a hard cold floor with no bed at all.

The harsh reality is it is happening to hundreds of children right here in the Tristate.  Actually right here in Owensboro.  Many children in our city go to sleep each night in conditions you could not even imagine.

One organization is combating this problem one bed at a time.  Sleep in Heavenly Peace was started back in 2012 by a guy named Luke Michelson from Twin Falls Idaho. Luke and his family heard about a little girl in their church that didn’t have a bed and decided to build her one. After that they heard about a few more and did the same for them. They soon realized that there was a real need for beds and started putting a group to gether to make this happen. They slowly grew to about 8 – 10 chapters mainly in the Idaho/Utah area. About 2018 word had gotten out and they were asked to be on a couple of national talk shows and it really started taking off from there.

Bruce Sheldon, president of the Owensboro chapter got involved in the fall of 2019  when as he says "was led to the website" and he knew he was meant to help out.

Here is Bruce's story on how the Owensboro chapter got its' start;

After inquiring about the Owensboro chapter I found out that there wasn’t one and in fact the nearest chapter was about 2 hours in every direction. What I didn’t realize was the amount of beds actually needed, it’s estimated that the need is around 2-3% of the population so in perspective Owensboro’s needs are roughly 1200 – 1800 beds!  At that point I decided to find out what it would take to bring SHP to Owensboro. I flew to Twin Falls, Idaho for chapter president training along with another volunteer and here we are today. We just completed our 50th bed built! We had planned to start building sooner but this virus had us completely shut down for several months.

Everyone at SHP volunteers their time, no one gets paid, that includes everyone at the headquarters in Twin Falls. To date nationally this Sleep In Heavenly Peace has built over 60,000 beds. It’s been hard this year to get out and educate people, businesses, organizations on the program and how much donations are needed.

The Owensboro Civitan club donated $4,000 last fall to help purchase all the tools needed for building the beds. Businesses and organizations are needed to step up so beds can continue to be built.

For $4,000 a business can sponsor a build and put their name on it, some places like to do this and have their employees actually build the beds as team/bonding exercise. For the ones

Bruce said; There’s nothing like making a bed delivery to a child that’s never had a bed. It really does your heart good, as much as it does for the kids when you get to see the smile on their face.

SLEEP IN HEAVENLY PEACE BED BUILDS

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