Kirk LaPointe
Executive Sleep-Out
I
t remains a pox on our houses that we have hundreds of young people on our streets at night, fleeing violence and abuse and flung into exploitation and addiction. We are too wealthy and sophisticated to abide this, aren’t we? Well, we aren’t. To me, in privilege and advantage long after any early-life struggle, the moral choice is clear: Do something about it or help someone do something about it. Three times now I’ve spent a night on the streets, not so much to gain a clear sense of that grave life—because it is the smallest possible taste of it—but to raise money to pull as many out of this horror story and into hopefulness. It is a step and only that, but I’ve aligned myself with Covenant House, the internationally respected organization that brings youth into warm confines, clothes, and counselling—what it calls a continuum of care to provide new options for employment and housing that might just turn around someone’s fate.
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Every year Covenant House holds what it calls an Executive Sleep-Out. About 50 of us get a sleeping bag and a layer of cardboard and hold forth in the elements until the morning. Preceding that, we hear from a handful of the children—and they are children still—who are wrenching themselves from the wrong clutches through the Crisis Program of Covenant House.
Every year Covenant House holds what it calls an Executive Sleep-Out. About 50 of us get a sleeping bag and a layer of cardboard and hold forth in the elements until the morning. The clutches are crazy: 70 per cent of the young people have left violent households, half have suffered physical or sexual abuse, half have contended with drugs and alcohol, one third of the young women have escaped the sex trade. In our city. You have to think as they sit in front of you, that could have been me. I have known hunger as a child, but not its depravation. I have known trauma, but not its violence or abuse. I have strayed, but not into addiction. The Society of Notaries Public of British Columbia
It defies logic that with our knowledge and resources, in a city of expensive pre-sales and supercars, we have not applied the wherewithal to effectively smite the scandalous presence of economic and emotional poverty in our midst. And so we slept outside, under the open sky. This year’s event was eased by the disappearance of days-long rain minutes before we went out to the parking lot for the night. You wake up with a sore hip, even a sore back. If you want a true taste of homelessness, one young person told me, wake up to no shoes—then see what you can and can’t do. What I can’t imagine is that the night that jarred the Sleep-Out participants’ biorhythms would be considered the most peaceable part of a day as a full-time resident of the streets. It was noisy, smelly, fraught with uncertainty and improvisation to get through it; I can’t fathom what happens to our core when street life intersects with the factors that drove someone there. We raised $1.2 million that night, but we will need millions more, again and again and again. Next year, or even sooner, I hope you will help. s
Kirk LaPointe is Editor-in-Chief of Business in Vancouver. Volume 27 Number 4 Winter 2018
