DAN LEBLANC

Commerce students “raise awareness” in the Arts Tunnel.

Every year we see business students don orange T-shirts and ask for donations during 5 Days for the Homeless. Most people, if they think about it at all, consider 5 Days a helpful philanthropic exercise. However, it may be time to re-evaluate this practice and see if it actually does as much good as much as we expect it to.

5 Days was founded at the University of Alberta School of Business in 2005. In that first year, three business students slept on the U of A campus for five nights. The campaign has since grown in both size and support, with 26 business faculties across the country participating this year. Since 2005, a total of over $975,000 has been raised for charities across Canada.

On the campaign’s website, the organizers write that “the students identified homelessness as a growing issue and wanted to give back to the community while at the same time changing the negative perception that business students are greedy and do not care about the community.” By these standards, the 5 Days campaign has no doubt been a rousing success at the University of Saskatchewan, and countrywide.

The charity for 5 Days Saskatoon is Egadz, a community-based organization that seeks to help “hard-to-serve” youth in Saskatoon. There is no doubt that the work Egadz does engages people classified as homeless, and those who are housing-insecure. (While “homeless” is the phrase used most frequently, most people associate that word with people living on the streets long-term. Someone can still be homeless or houseless while living in short-term housing or in a shelter.)

Each year during these five days of philanthropic work, Edwards students are a very public group on campus; we see business students showing us that they care about their community. These efforts help combat the negative view many other students have of their business counterparts.

I am deeply skeptical of this campaign. First, because of the obvious fact that five business students are not going to be representative of the houseless population in Saskatoon. Their highly publicized experience is not illustrative of the typical houseless person’s struggles, yet it is often treated as such — if not by the participants themselves then by some of the discussion around their work.

While the participants’ experience perhaps looks similar to homelessness (they do not sleep in beds and they rely on others’ assistance) it is markedly different in content and context.

These “homeless” participants are given social capital for sleeping outside of a home ­— they are congratulated for being “brave” — which is the opposite of an actual homeless person’s experience. The participants know there will be an end to their houselessness, and they go into the week well fed. Even if they did experience the scourge of malnourishment for a week, they would be better able to remain healthy than would someone caught in the cycle of poverty.

The second element of 5 Days Saskatoon that I am skeptical of is that Edwards School of Business, which puts its name behind this campaign and benefits from the publicity and the good will that flows from it, encourages the very behaviour that, at a societal level, contributes to rampant houselessness. By normalizing and legitimizing their presence and “branding” as a college concerned for the houseless in Saskatoon, they are engaging in a public relations campaign, one that has been successful in increasing their likeability, to the detriment of the houseless.

To paraphrase The Fugees, they pretend to be on the side of Zion when they are with Babylon.

Again, 5 Days does very well what it was created for. My sense is that the participants in 5 Days Saskatoon are also aware of the scope of the campaign. The broader community should not be hyperbolic about what the participants are doing, what they are experiencing or what they have learned.

The houseless and housing-insecure in Saskatoon do not take on the form of poverty for public relations campaigns; they live it. They are not considered “ethical” because of their hunger, and they are not lauded for it. Barbeques are not thrown in their honour. Local celebrities do not choose to spend a night with them as “guest sleepers.” Sheaf articles are rarely written about them.

With files from Kevin Menz and Tannara Yelland.

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Photo: Jordan Dumba