This March, college students in the U.S. are skipping the beach to spend their spring break on the streets of Washington, D.C., among homeless people.
“I wanted to do something that was different and unique,” said Matthew Nobles, a University of Florida senior who first came to Washington for an Urban Plunge two years ago. “I didn’t want to do the stereotypical college kid thing.”
The National Coalition for the Homeless began the Urban Plunge program in the 1980s and now organizes more than a dozen plunges each year. After creating cover stories for themselves, students break into pairs or small groups and spend 48 hours experiencing homelessness – sleeping on the street, eating at soup kitchens and asking for money.
“They know after 48 hours they’re going to go home and take a shower, but for 48 hours they get to feel what it’s like,” said Michael O’Neill, Speakers’ Bureau coordinator at NCH.
Paige Blair, a junior at the University of Kansas, found it a full-time job to travel between shelters for meals — a job made even more exhausting by the icy reception she received from passersby.
“I’ve never had people not smile back at me before,” she said. “Within 20 minutes my spirits had completely dampened, and I could see how hopeless things would feel after months and months of people just ignoring you.”
At night, groups meet with homeless people who serve as guides, sharing their stories and showing students what it’s like to spend a night in the cold. “I would bring them downtown and we would sleep in the midst of the downtown area with all the noise and people walking by,” said former guide George Siletti. “Then the next night I would bring them to a nice, quiet place so they could see the difference.”
John Harrison, a member of the Speakers’ Bureau, is returning for his third year as a guide. “It wasn’t until after I did it I realized that I enjoyed it, and it was a really eye-opening experience for young people,” he said. “That’s really what kept me interested in doing it. I could tell how much it changed people’s minds about homelessness.”
Harrison’s groups have tested how long they could sit in fast-food restaurants before being kicked out and tried to bring their belongings into museums, “things that homeless people need to do but unless you’re homeless you may not really think about,” he said. “You have to carry all your stuff everywhere you go, and just getting on and off a bus becomes a more elaborate undertaking.”
Plungers, as they are called, try panhandling in areas all over town, and Blair found the results surprising.
“I found that the people who were poor gave more,” she said. “When we were in Georgetown we were just shunned, but in the poor areas I think people understood that they were pretty much just a paycheck away from being where we were.”
The rest of the week program participants volunteer at organizations that serve homeless people and lobby on Capitol Hill.
“I was surprised by how much the experience made me question American patriotism,” Blair said, “and how ironic it was that we were in the capital of the ‘greatest country in the world’ and they were allowing the people that we talked to to just wander around the streets with severe mental illnesses. It was definitely a time that I questioned American ethics more than usual.”
Although some people reached out to him on the street, Nobles said, help and even acknowledgement was hard to come by.
“You start to be dehumanized after awhile when people don’t recognize that you’re there,” he said. “That was shocking to me. By the end of the 48 hours, I had lost all hope in humanity because nobody would look at me.”
It’s not uncommon for plungers to return home committed to homelessness issues, O’Neill said. “A lot of them have said how it’s changed their lives,” he said. “They’ve gone back and organized food drives or sleep-outs as a result of this experience.”
In Gainesville, Fla., Nobles now stocks his car with bags of toiletries, personal items and resource cards to hand out as he drives around.
“After you see things from the other side,” he said, “then you’ve got to do something about it.”
