Cardboard Campout

The Cardboard Campout to End Homelessness is an all night experience to raise money and awareness for the Homeless of Denver and to immerse it’s participants into what the world of a homeless person is like for one night.
The Cardboard Campout works like a charity race in the sense that the Campout's participants approach their friends, family, people at their church, and businesses to ask them for donations. In exchange, the participants will agree to sleep outside all night on a piece of cardboard. This past summer we hosted the CC during Heaven Fest. Our hope is to mobilize the faith community to stir up a movement of prayers and givers so that we may actually end homelessness. It is possible. Denver is our launching ground. The city has taken on a 10 year initiative to end homelessness. The plan is inspired by the National Alliance to End Homelessness. They are encouraging cities to adopt a plan. Denver has done this and from 2006-2008 Denver has seen an 11% reduction in overall homelessness and a 36% decrease in chronic homelessness. And, panhandling on the 16th Street Mall has dropped by 92 percent. In reducing both overall and chronic homelessness, Denver's Road Home is ahead of schedule. In fact, just three years into the initiative, we have created 60% of the housing stock for the chronically homeless called for in the plan and we are on track to meet this goal by 2010. As the subject of more than 60 newspaper articles and ongoing radio and television interviews, Denver’s Road Home has been acknowledged locally and nationally for its strategic innovations.’ - Mayor John Hickenlooper, 2009 ‘We have been asked lately if the economy is going to impact the progress we are making to end homelessness as we know it in 10 years. The answer is simple: We have never been more determined to move this initiative forward. Just look at the numbers: • In the past four years, we have developed more than 1,500 new units of housing for the homeless in partnership with our community; • We have prevented more than 2,000 families from becoming homeless and helped 3,278 homeless people obtain employment; • The faith community continues to stand by our side, and has assisted in mentoring 564 families out of homelessness; -        Mayor John Hickenlooper, 2010
There are more than 3,900 homeless men, women and children living in Denver. This is a sobering statistic, especially when you consider that: 60% of the homeless are people in families with children. 29% percent of homeless respondents in Denver are women. 40% of the homeless are working. The most commonly reported reasons for homelessness reported in Denver are loss of a job (28%), housing costs (23%) and the breakup of a family (20%). The Future: We think every city though unique can adopt a plan to end homelessness. We see the future of the CC as being a movement coming along side the National Alliance to End Homelessness; catalyzed and supported by the faith community but eventually adopted by whomever has the desire and passion to end homelessness in their city.  See pictures from the last Cardboard Campout            Would you like to give to this project? Your donation will allow me to invest my time to ending homelessness (Donate)     (My Role: Leadership, Event Development, Marketing, and Video Production)