(Radio Iowa) – One of the 15 “Sleep in Heavenly Peace” chapters in Iowa is holding a bed building event tomorrow (Wednesday), in Manchester. Keith Kramer is leader of the Delaware County chapter that formed four years ago to provide beds to kids who didn’t have one. “Once you see it, you get so involved with it,” Kramer said.

So far, Kramer’s group has made 450 beds for kids who’d been sleeping on floors or couches. Kramer said people in the community are helping to provide not just the bed frame, but sheets and pillows “Had a gal drop off six brand new quilts. She just made them,” Kramer says. “And talk about a labor of love with these quilts for these kids. It’s the one thing they’ve got. It’s something to hang onto.”

A previous “Sleep in Heavenly Peace” bed building event in Delaware County. (Photo by Janelle Tucker, KMCH)

Wednesday’s bed building event starts at 10 o’clock in the Beef Barn on the Delaware County Fairgrounds. Kramer and his team have assembled all the tools necessary to build the bed frames, they’re inviting more volunteers to join the effort. “Come for the experience,” Kramer said. “…Probably the bed thing is when they go back home and they’re talking to someone on the phone and they’re saying, ‘What did you do today?’ ‘Well, let me tell you. We built beds.’”

The Delaware County chapter of “Sleep in Heavenly Peace” is making beds not only for kids in their county, but has expanded to build beds for children in some of the cities and towns in neighboring Buchanan and Dubuque Counties. The national “Sleep in Heavenly Peace” website has an application form. It can be filled out by the legal guardian of a child between the ages of three and 17 or some other family member, a school or government agency can contact the group and request a bed for a child who doesn’t have one.

The organization’s website shows more than 325 “Sleep in Heavenly Peace” chapters nationwide have made almost 290,000 beds and have requests to make nearly 164,000 more. The group has chapters in the Iowa cities of Ames, Camanche, Des Moines, Muscatine, Shenandoah, Sioux City and Spirit Lake, plus the following counties have chapters: Jackson, Johnson, Jones, Linn, Union, Warren and Washington.