Four university students will sleep rough on campus all next week in a bid to raise awareness of Kelowna‘s homelessness problem.
They‘ll only be able to eat food that‘s donated to them, won‘t be able to take a shower, and plan on spending each night from Sunday to Friday sleeping in the UBC Okanagan courtyard.
“We‘ll be completely dependent on the goodwill of others,” Laurens Breugem, a 22-year-old management student, said on Tuesday.
“We‘ll be giving up the comforts and luxuries that we‘re used to.”
For the first time, UBC Okanagan students are participating in Five Days for Homeless, a nationwide charitable campaign started in 2005 by management students at University of Alberta. The idea is not only to promote awareness of homelessness issues across the country, but also to raise money for good causes in the 21 cities where the event is to occur.
“The goal for UBC Okanagan is to raise $2,000 (for the United Way), though we are going to aim much higher,” said Kati Gorbacheva, another student involved in the local event.
A recent study estimated there are at least 400 people in Kelowna either living on the streets or in a shelter. Sixty per cent are men, the median age is 38 and the average length of homelessness is 31 months.
About 20 per cent of homeless said they had jobs, but couldn‘t afford a place to live. Students will be expected to attend their regular classes next week, and do all their assigned work.
They don‘t plan on bringing in tents, intending just to use sleeping bags and some kind of cardboard shelter.
“Obviously, we‘re not really homeless and won‘t be facing the kind of challenges that people on the street really do, every day,” Breugem said.
“We‘ll be going back to our regular lives next Friday,” he added. “But hopefully we‘ll have collected a significant amount of money for the United Way and maybe inspired other people to think what they could do to help the homeless.”
Beginning on Sunday, the UBCO students will blog about their experience at www.5days.ca.
