Over forty local business and community leaders took part in this year’s Oxfordshire CEO Sleepout, a fundraising event for Oxfordshire Homeless Movement (OHM), which took place in University Parks last week. Prior to sleeping outside for the night, participants had the opportunity to network with one another and to listen to speeches by event organisers and speakers who had experienced homelessness in Oxfordshire.
Jane Cranston, Chair of OHM, told Cherwell: “This is the fourth year we’ve done this event, and we do it in conjunction with CEO Sleepout, who have a franchise. We’ve had some very interesting people sleep here, including very senior members of the University – the Vice-Chancellor has done it a couple of times.”
Some of the money raised through this event will go towards OHM’s initiatives to support women experiencing homelessness in particular. Cranston added: “There are a lot more women rough sleeping than are normally counted, because women don’t sleep out at night in the same way [as men], so they’re hidden…there are about four times as many as are counted.”
Jane Madden, Event Coordinator for CEO Sleepout, told Cherwell that the purpose of the Sleepout is for local business and community leaders to “communicate between themselves about what they can do and the changes that they could make to improve people’s lives: bringing in people to their organisations who don’t always have the qualifications they might be looking for, giving people a chance, and taking away the stereotypes of being homeless”.
Cherwell spoke to several event participants about their motivations for taking part. Sonya Batchelor, CEO of Buckinghamshire-based food bank One Can Trust, told Cherwell: “Taking part in the event last year pivoted my entire career…[it] cemented for me what I want to do: I want to have a social impact.”
Angela Unsworth, Jesus College Home Bursar, has participated in the annual event since its inception. She told Cherwell: “Some years we’ve been out, it’s been howling gales and pouring rain, or it’s been -3 or -4 degrees. But even so, we do it for one night. There are people that we’re raising money for that do it every night, regardless of what the weather is. It makes you understand what people have to go through, day in and day out, and how divided the city is.”
Neil Unsworth, Head of Resilience at the University, told Cherwell: “When you wake up and you’ve got either frost on your sleeping bag or you’re soaked, you realise you can go home and have a shower and get warm, but people on the streets couldn’t do that. And it really brings it home as to how tough it can be. So even a little taste of it, which is nothing really like actually being on the streets, makes a big difference.”
Before participants took to their sleeping bags, they heard from speakers who expressed first hand accounts of their experience being homeless. Jack, one of the speakers, was homeless for several years in London and Oxford before he received help from Edge Housing, an Oxford-based charity offering temporary supported accommodation.
Jack told Cherwell that his early life was “very chaotic”. On attending the Sleepout, he said: “This is my way of giving back. My life’s just been so traumatic and [Oxford] is the only place that I’ve ever felt safe.”
, last week in University Parks.){kind=link}