Hundreds spend night in sleeping bags in New York's Times Square

Piles of pillows, yoga mats, sleeping mats, and bags lay on New York's Time Square on December 7 as people gathered to observe World’s Big Sleep Out. In four designated plazas in Times Square, some 900 people joined to raise awareness about homelessness. Josh Littlejohn, the owner of a chain of Scottish sandwich shops and an advocate for providing jobs, shelter, and housing for people who need them is the organiser of the event. Littlejohn describes homelessness as a global crisis that needs to be addressed. About 50 cities, including New York, London, and New Delhi, joined to raise awareness of the problem of homelessness and the need for money to fight it.

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Stars join in

Participants in Littlejohn’s event have collected pledges for donations from supporters. The event was also joined by Hollywood stars such as actor Will Smith who read a “bedtime story” to the crowd. Likewise, musicians Jake Bugg and Tom Walker performed and the actress Helen Mirren read to participants in Trafalgar Square in London. In Pasadena, Calif, Ziggy Marley, Ellie Goulding, Meghan Trainor, and Sean Kingston entertained those taking part in the Rose Bowl. 

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Littlejohn told the media that though the event was in no way the emulation of actually being homeless, yet it would definitely leave an impact on the ones who were part of it, in turn, raising awareness of the issue.

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Funds raised help homeless

The organiser set a fund-raising target of $50 million for his event. He informed that half of the money would go to nonprofit groups that deal with homelessness in the communities where the donations come from, like the Coalition for the Homeless in New York and the other half is to go to charities around the world like UNICEF that help people displaced not only by extreme poverty but also by armed conflict and natural disasters. Besides this, the event will be followed by a political drive led by the Institute of Global Homelessness, an advocacy group with a goal of eliminating unsheltered homelessness in 150 cities and countries by 2030. 

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