Box City raises awareness about poverty

Cardboard boxes appeared taped, stacked, and squashed together this past Monday on Front Campus in a temporary structure built to educate the community. Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political honor society, organized the Box City event and an accompanying benefit concert the following night to raise awareness of poverty and funds to combat it throughout the GCSU community.

Cody Hagler, a musician from Athens, played at Amici’s free of charge for the benefit concert held this past Tuesday.

According to Jason Rich, assistant professor of political science and advisor to Pi Sigma Alpha, the group wanted to address global inequality by raising awareness on key issues that occur on both a local and global level.

“One of the things we want to make our students aware of at Georgia College is that there is not just the Georgia College bubble … poverty is one of the things that comes into real focus when you go to compare the students here at Georgia College to the greater community around us to the international community. There is a great disparity in the situations that each will come from,” Rich said.

Box City gave students the opportunity to forego their usual bed and experience homelessness by sleeping out in cardboard boxes and to donate nonperishable goods, shoes and clothes, or monetary donations.

“Students can walk by and say you’ve got to be a little crazy for sleeping out here, but that’s what brings awareness,” Rich said. “It’s the shock value of hey there are actually students sleeping in boxes when it is still chilly.”

Most students and faculty stopped for a few hours to support the cause before heading in from the cool night air, but Brad Fleming, a senior political science major, spent all night outside with five others.

“The experience was both gratifying and difficult,” Fleming said. “Being with friends was cool, but spending the night in a box was a challenge to say the least. The ground was hard, the boxes were cold and the quarters were cramped. I missed my apartments heating the most. I definitely would not want to stay in a box longer than one night.”

While the Box City sleep-out drew a small gathering, the benefit concert at Amici on Tuesday night attracted a larger audience. Cody Hagler, a musician from Athens, performed and certainly did not disappoint with his soulful pop sound, good humor and popular covers including Jason Mraz’s “I’m yours”.

Hillary Bower, a senior political science major with a concentration in international affairs, initiated the idea of a concert and T-shirt to raise funds.

“The benefit concert raises more awareness with people that wouldn’t have been involved to begin with because the benefit concert makes it more fun,” Rich said. “I think that is what gets the fundraising up because people want to buy T-shirts and go to concerts.”

At least $4 from each $15 T-shirt and all the proceeds raised from the $2 cover charge will go toward benefiting the Milledgeville community since Amici did not charge for the use of the establishment and Hagler played free of charge.

“With the funds (collected from the concert) we are going to buy shoes for kids in the community that can’t afford to buy good shoes,” Bower said.

Four boxes of clothes and non-perishable food were collected and $236 was raised from the concert, but there is also an intangible increase of public awareness from the presence of Box City.

“Whether (students) go or not it still raises awareness,” Rich said. “It’s not just that they donate now, that they do something now but that (the issue of global inequality) gets into their psyche and they think about it because we do sort of live in the GCSU bubble. Maybe by just calling some attention to it the next time that they are outside that bubble they are going to recognize it a little bit more, become a little more conscious of it, a little bit more aware of the world around them and eventually that will translate into a greater global society.”

To tie in the international aspect of poverty, Pi Sigma Alpha is planning to bulk order TOMS shoes from orders they are collecting currently around GCSU. For every pair ordered TOMS shoes donates a pair to a children in need internationally.

Posted by Rebecca Burns on Mar 19 2010. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry