Event offers look at life on street

300 to spend night in LR as ‘homeless’ in annual fundraiser

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Dozens of makeshift homeless camps will be set up Tuesday at River Market pavilions in downtown Little Rock to raise awareness of homeless conditions in central Arkansas as well as funds for the Union Rescue Mission.

The Union Rescue Mission expects about 300 people to participate Tuesday during its Night on the Street event from 5 to 11 p.m. To gain an idea of how Little Rock’s homeless people survive, teams of participants will huddle on the concrete with blankets, or inside cardboard boxes, if they have them.

The participants will then try to share the experience with as many people as possible through tweeting, posting on Facebook and Instagram, and calling family, friends and colleagues. Armed with talking points and statistics about homeless Arkansans, they will reach out to others with messages about homelessness and ask them to donate to the Union Rescue Mission, mission officials said.

“It’s really an opportunity to touch more people with information - to empower them to make much better decisions if they are coming in contact with someone who is homeless or on the streets,” said the group’s executive director, William Tollett.

The event aims to inform the public about addiction and domestic abuse among the homeless population in central Arkansas. The Union Rescue Mission runs two homes for men and women dealing with those issues.

The group hopes to raise $70,000 - or about 9 percent of its annual budget - through Tuesday’s event. Last year, 228 participants gained pledges worth $73,000. The event has grown since its first year in 2007, when 30 participants collected about $30,000in donations.

Tollett came up with the idea after thinking about his neighbors’ reactions and comments when he talked to them about the homeless, the addicted and abuse victims.

“I live in a suburban community and they go, ‘I don’t know anybody experiencing that,’ and they go, ‘Homelessness? Oh, that makes me uncomfortable,’” Tollett said. “I thought, if any of us ever had to spend one night on the street, that’s probably all it would take.”

More than 20 businesses, nonprofits, schools and other groups have signed on ascorporate sponsors for the annual event.

Participants will direct those they interact with online and by phone during the event to the mission’s website, urmission.org, where donations can be submitted by choosing “Night on the Street 2014” under the drop-down menu of the Events tab and using the “Click Here to Designate your Gift” link.

Tollett said that one year during the event, the largest donation was from a woman in North Carolina who had seen repostings of someone’s Facebook status and donated $600 and then another $1,000 a few hours later.

“What’s amazing to me is that by using the social media component, we are really able to share the message of homelessness and it applies whether it’s in your community or another state. That 26-year-old young lady ended up volunteering at a shelter in Charlotte because of what she saw us doing here in Little Rock,” Tollett said.

Rachel Kremer, a former chairman of the rescue mission’s board, recalled a Night on the Street event a few years ago when a homeless woman crawled into Kremer’s cardboard box. During the event, participants are led through tours around the area and to known homeless camps where they give out blankets, food and water.

That opportunity to actually connect with people who are the nonprofit’s cause is not true of most events that raise funds and awareness for an issue, Kremer said.

“You have those experiences in your life that really turn your life around - those that give you a different perspective, maybe not so profound as going into a different profession, but just make you look at issues differently,” Kremer said. “This was one of those important learning lessons for me.”

She added: “To be out there when it’s so cold and be able to know I’m done and I get to go home and sleep under warm covers, but realize these people don’t have that opportunity was just eye-opening.”

According to Tollett, the woman Kremer encountered in her cardboard box was taken to the group’s women’s shelter that night, entered a six-month domestic abuse recovery program, received job-readiness help and is now an employed and productive member of society.

Anyone wishing to sign up for Tuesday’s event can register through the rescue mission’s website by accessing forms in the Night on the Street 2014 section. Mission representatives will be available throughout the event to answer questions that participants might encounter, Tollett said.

Arkansas, Pages 13 on 03/16/2014