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Navigation: | Homeless for a night
A group of Concord University students recently set up cardboard boxes and "camped out" in an effort to gain understanding and garner empathy among others for the plight of the homeless.
Student coordinator for the project, Ashley Hackney said the annual cardboard community camp tradition began four years ago.
Most of the participants are motivated by a desire to serve the community, said students Danielle Richmond and Amy Santangelo, as they struggled to setup their cardboard home.
Richmond said her entry is a Sigma Sigma Sigma community project. "Sigma serves children, and homelessness impacts children," she said. After the cardboard camping venture, sorority members plan to spend the rest of the weekend volunteering at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Play Therapy Room, Richmond added.
Before the 25 students were turned loose for their night of living in cardboard boxes, they attended a 40 minute lecture by guest speaker Kimberly Walsh, President of the Roark-Sullivan Lifeway Center, Inc., in Charleston, W.Va.
A West Virginia native and alumni of Parkersburgh Community College and West Virginia University, Wash said her exposure to homelessness came in Philadelphia in 1984. "At first, I didn't pay much attention to the boxes lined up along the streets but I did notice a lot of people mumbling and wandering around," she said.
Three weeks into her time in Philadelphia, Wash said she was startled when a man popped out of a box in front of her. "I came up out of my shoes screaming and he screamed too," she said. "That was my first real experience with homelessness."
Almost every morning after the startling first meeting, Walsh said she and the man spoke. "We never exchanged names but we befriended one another."
Being from West Virginia, Walsh said she knew about being poor but "this was a whole new level of poverty. Something was really wrong with this picture," she said.
The speaker said she worked for several organizations in diverse areas as far away as Florida while pursing advanced degrees before coming back to West Virginia in 1998 to coordinate the Guiltman Center, a Charelston flop house for the homeless. "It was more of a crack house, a disaster that took several years to cleanup," she said.
Walsh said her desire to serve the homeless continues to grow. She now oversees the Twin City Center in St. Albans, as well as the Lifeway Center (Guiltman Center) in Charleston. The centers' mission is to encourage homeless people to step out of the shadows of abandoned building that mask the problem - to accept blankets, food, encouragement and shelter.
"We are preparing to launch an offender reentry program for people coming out of prison," she added.
The Charleston center served 269 people the first year, 474 the second, 626 the third, 878 the fourth, more than 1,000 the fifth, and 1,500 during the current year.
The problem is real and growing. The 60 bed facility is full every night, she said.
As President of the West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness, Walsh said $1.7 million in aid funding has been captured to establish and develop programs to serve the homeless in West Virginia.
Between the Charleston and St. Albans shelters, Walsh said 5,500 to 6.000 people in need are being served. "This is very significant considering the homeless who are not being helped," she said.
In a city it isn't too difficult to figure out who is homeless but in rural America there is "a lot of hidden homeless."
West Virginia has a high per capita percentage of veterans and 33 percent of the homeless in the United States are veterans.
People are living in cars and abandoned trailers and buildings. There are four or five families living in single room abandoned buildings, Walsh said. "Think about that for a second. No bath, no toilet, five families" she said.
"We don't typically see it but it is out there." Children live under bridges and in abandoned cars, too proud to give up or to ask for help. It is a testimony to the human spirit that "many of these children are getting up each day and figuring ways to go to school." Walsh said.
The annual cardboard box village at Concord University is important because it helps people "see and feel" the need.
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