Box City Sheds Light

The Concord University Bonner Scholars gave the university a small taste of a problem plaguing thousands of people in the United States: homelessness. 

    Hannah Suydam is a veteran Bonner scholar and took the initiative to organize this year’s Box City event. 

    “Box City is a 24 hour event to raise awareness for homelessness,” she said. She went on to explain that it is an annual event for the Bonner Scholars, and that everyone who participates has to get their own materials and build their own makeshift shelters to live in overnight to simulate what it would be like to be homeless.

    The rules are simple: each box must be occupied by at least one person at all times during the 24 hour event, and participants are not to have any electronics or other things that a homeless person would have to do without.

    “It’s supposed to help our students see homelessness face-to-face and be able to experience it. We do it in the spring, so it is a little warmer, but it still gets chilly at night so you can still experience it, but it’s safe,” explained Suydam. 

    In addition to the eye-opening experience of being effectively homeless for an entire day, Box City and the Bonner Scholars also use the event as an opportunity to raise funds for a worthy cause. “All of the non-Bonner boxes donate $25 to be able to do the box, and this year we’re giving it [the donations] to Five Loaves and Two Fishes in Kimball, West Virginia, in McDowell County, and all the Bonner boxes, the Bonner program is actually paying the $25 fee for their boxes, and each Bonner scholar brought in at least five canned foods that we’re going to donate,” Suydam said. The organization chose Five Loaves and Two Fishes because it was a nearby cause: “Five Loaves and Two fishes is a food pantry in McDowell County that we’re wanting to team up with, it’s our first time getting with that agency. We wanted to stay close to home,” said Suydam. 

    A side effect of homelessness is hunger and insufficient nutrition. In an effort to make this year’s Box City as realistic as possible, Suydam and the Bonner Scholars hosted an Oxfam dinner for the participants to demonstrate how prevalent hunger is in the United States. To do so, the group divided up the participants into the upper, middle, and lower classes, and fed them accordingly while also reading statistics on homelessness and hunger and the stories of some real-life homeless people and how they got in that position. 

    Suydam further explained the Oxfam dinner, saying, “The top 20% of our population that actually gets to eat got pizza and juice, and got to eat at a set up table, and our middle class represented our 30%, and they got rice and beans, and they had to sit outside on a tarp, and they got water and a fork. Then our lower class, representing 50% of our population, all they got was a cup of rice, and they didn’t even get a fork to eat with it.” 

    Among participants were Cassidy Justice and Maizy Landreth. Both girls were new to Box City and explained how their first year went. 

    For Justice, she says she realized how difficult homelessness could really be, even on a small scale. “As we were building it, it was really cold, it was really difficult, and I couldn’t imagine living here without any blankets, sweatshirts, that would be really bad,” she explained. Landreth agreed that it was difficult, but overall thought the experience was a good experience that she hopes to repeat. “I wanted to participate in the event to learn about the homeless population and some of the things that they go through. It’s been a really good learning experience and I hope to do it again next year,” she said.