Members of Phi Beta Sigma slept outside in recognition of homeless awareness week, Nov. 8 at the Hayden lawn on the Tempe campus. (Photo by Saketh Parenjape)The Lambda Xi chapter of Phi Beta Sigma slept on Hayden lawn at the Tempe campus Friday night in honor of National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week. The chapter’s sister sorority, Zeta Phi Beta, participated in the event as well.
The event also aimed to collect canned goods to donate to local shelters.
Phi Beta Sigma president Kyle Denman said the “Sleep Out for the Homeless” event is celebrated nationally by the fraternity and was founded in the early 1990s. The fraternity is community service-based and tries to embody the motto: “Culture for service and service for humanity.”
“This event is not to mimic or mock the homeless, but it’s to bring awareness,” he said. “There’s a lot of homeless people in our community, sleeping at Daley Park or even at Kiwanis. The reason that we’re out here is that we’re trying to raise awareness for that but also trying to raise can goods so we can donate to the Tempe Community Action Agency.”
Denman said that though Homelessness Awareness Week is actually next week, the fraternity chose to host this event Friday as another organization will be celebrating its founder’s week. He said the event’s activities would involve playing games and discussing poverty and homelessness.
“We’re actually just going to talk about situations in our community,” he said. “I’ll go around and ask, ‘Hey do you know that this is what’s going on at Daley Park or Escalante or Kiwanis and just different areas? Do you know how you can become involved in providing food?’”
The fraternity will be participating later in the fall with Delta Sigma Theta’s Home Away from Home dinner for students who cannot go home for Thanksgiving. Denman said that the organization would intentionally make more food than needed, in order to later give leftovers to the homeless.
Yadima Ugwuala, secretary for the Black & African Coalition at ASU, said she felt the event would give students perspective.
“I feel that this just brings awareness because there’s a lot of things that homeless people have to go through that we don’t really take into consideration,” she said. “It just puts us in their shoes and I feel that is very important.”
Coordinator for Student and Cultural Engagement Emeka Ikegwuonu said he believed it was college students’ duty to be proactive not only in education but community service. Events such as this one, he said, keep a dialogue going for students.
“This is a good way to show other students what some real life situations are, because when you’re on a university campus you can kind of be in your own little paradox inside these four walls,” he said. “Why is it important to always give back to your community? Why is it important to have social services? This kind of keeps that constant image that there are individuals who are in need.”
Ikegwuonu said that although he belongs to a different greek letter organization on campus, he felt it was important to participate in the event. In order to be a change agent, one must be involved on the local level, as well as national and global, he added.
“Service is something that is often times pinpointed at just a day, but when you really want to make change it has to be something that you can do on a consistent basis,” he said. “You get exposed to something, you take that exposure and you go to an agency that’s doing it every single day so you become a change agent for your community.”
Denman said the fraternity’s 100th year anniversary will take place next semester. As of now, the organization has plans to celebrate by engaging in more community service.
“Instead of celebrating something for us for we’re going to try to do something with one of the programs downtown that helps out with the homeless,” he said. “Just for us here, we’re going to do something like that, for people to celebrate what we’re actually about.”
Reach the reporter at cncalde1@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @katie_calderon
Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the organization that will be celebrating its founder's week.
