(Unexpected?) Harvest

So last week was Sleep Out 2013! Thursday, November 21, 28 people slept in the courtyard of 929 Atlantic Avenue to raise money and awareness for Covenant House. I was not one of them--I was the 29th person that stayed up all night (30+ hours total, to be exact) and inside in order to process money, post things on Facebook, give updates to our corporate folks, and support each sleeper as  most of them filtered in and out of the building throughout the night. By the time I got home Friday, I was very humbled and quite overwhelmed at the unexpected harvest that had taken place...

 

We started planning for this back in early summer. Atlantic City's leaders came up with a "target list" of people we intended to approach for this "executive sleep out". Only one major problem=we didn't know a lot of executives! For the purposes of this event, "executive" was defined as someone with the title "President", "CEO", " "Chairman","Vice President", "Executive of___"...It could also be someone whose company had X number of employees and brought in X number of dollars per year or have a personal net worth of "$". They could also be celebrities or political people. Our list soon became shorter and shorter.

 

I started to push back a bit. My argument was that South Jersey had a lot of small business owners, that we didn't have connections with a lot of people who fit the "executive criteria" set forth for the event, and that if we could get people to come who were just regular people or who "loosely" fit the criteria, then we'd be okay (I hoped!) This went back and forth for weeks until we finally got the green light to loosen our criteria a bit and include middle managers as well. There were a few folks we had questions about (professor? executive director of a non-profit?) but in the end we had 32 people register to take part.

 

Our initial goal was $250,000. Me and my lofty thinking.  About a quarter of the way through I was strongly encouraged to start out small, after all, this was our first year. So we made it $75,000. I started praying.

 

The week before the event we were in the 80%s towards our goal. Someone wonderful decided to do a gifts match (get 5 more donations of any amount=$500 added to your fund raising, 10 new gifts=$1,000). That lit a fire under 90% of our sleepers and after 1 week, 21 of them had met the $1,000 match which put us over our goal at $107,000. When I saw that, I laughed and cried at the same time. I shook my head and kept murmuring, "Thank You, thank You",...harvest.

 

The irony is, by the time the event was said and done Friday morning, our total stood at over $119,000...by Sunday morning, over $120K...As of this writing, $121,232.76. Harvest indeed.

 

We had no Donald Trumps...We had no casino CEOs...no celebrities, no politicians...We had small business owners, a teacher, an office manager, chef, a few casino and health care VPS, even a local pastor. And they raised over $121,000...

 

The night itself was pretty flawless. No major problems and, unfortunately, it wasn't that cold. So much for which to be thankful...and it reminded me of how God can take anyone or any situation and do exactly as He pleases. Some of these people didn't think they could raise much of anything but were so surprised at how willing people were to support their efforts. As often as I had opportunity I kept praising God for this harvest which is enough to cover our food budget for 2 years. The best part? The overhead was close to nothing! Some sleeping bags, cardboard, wool hats, etc. AND, further, it provided an experience, a little glimpse into "what it's like"...Something these people will never forget.

 

This event, so far, is my personal "Feeding of the 5,000" miracle, I feel. I never--EVER--could have imagined that God would provide so much...why do I ever doubt...

 

Our Sleepers

3 pals from Rhode Island who came down (one guy's son works for us)

Local business owners and friends

Some people were able to sleep

 

 

Some people kept themselves occupied

 

 

It was this sleeper's birthday..so I got a few kids together, a Tastycake, and candle plus a card that many kids signed. We ventured out after he'd snuggled in to sleep and sang Happy Birthday.

One person made their own headboard which made the rounds for photo opps...

The kids who'd sang Happy Birthday decided to hang out for a while. They formed a circle with a few sleepers and they stayed up singing songs at the top of their lungs.

Here's me around 10:30pm on my third can of sugar-free Red Bull.

Our site Director, Brian.

Very few people took advantage of sleeping IN the boxes, preferring, since it wasn't soooo cold to double up the cardboard so they weren't sleeping directly on the concrete.

Wee morning hours...

Our oldest sleeper was in his 70's...what a trooper!

Me at 6am...