Homelessness Awareness Week informs about poverty, hunger

Walk down the brightly lit street of Kirkwood Avenue and they are there. As the days grow colder, they are huddled in public buildings on and off campus, seeking warmth.
The homeless are not just found in large cities, but also here, in a small college town in the Midwest.

Nov. 14–20 marks National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, when many communities join the effort to raise awareness about homelessness, poverty and hunger in the United States.

Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, co-sponsored by the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Student Campaign Against Hunger & Homelessness, occurs the week before Thanksgiving in the spirit of education, enlightenment and thankfulness, according to the manual distributed by organizers of the event.

The leading cause of homelessness is the lack of affordable housing for low-income individuals and families in the United States, according to the coalition.

Other cited causes are mental illness, substance abuse and low-paying jobs.

The recession was also named as a cause of homelessness. The 9.6 percent unemployment rate forced many foreclosures across the nation, according to the NCH.

“Our city has been more insulated from the economic downturn relative to many of our peers, but we don’t live on an economic island, and the waves of recession are washing up on our shores,” Mayor Mark Kruzan said in his State of the City Address this past February.

And it is not just individuals who suffer from homelessness. According to studies by the NCH, 41 percent of the homeless population consists of families.

According to the Children’s Defense Fund, a nonprofit agency of advocates for children, 2,171 American babies are born into poverty every day.

As part of the effort to raise homelessness awareness, Whitney Gent, development and communications director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, will be in Bloomington this week to speak about issues regarding the homeless.

This law center is the only national legal group completely focused on preventing and ending poverty and homelessness in the United States.

Gent’s talk, titled “The Man in the Trash Bag Shirt: Homelessness as a National, Local and Individual Crisis,” will be 7 p.m. today at Trinity Episcopal Church at 111 S. Grant Street, and it is free to the public.

“Everything we do has one, singular, common aim: to improve the livability of Bloomington, Indiana — because it’s that livability that drives investment in the community,” Kruzan said.

— Mary Kenney