By Mikayla van Loon
After a four year break from his cardboard box, Yarra Ranges councillor Tim Heenan is returning to doing his sleepout but this time for the new Holy Fools FreezeOut! Challenge.
For five days throughout Homelessness Week from 7-11 August, Cr Heenan will be getting uncomfortable by sleeping in a cardboard box in his backyard while hoping to raise $8000.
“I’ll be committing to be in the box at least eight hours every night,” he said.
For roughly 15 years now, Cr Heenan has participated in some sort of sleep out, ranging from 30 days to seven days meaning he’s banked a number of hours out in the cold.
“I was doing the calculations when I was remembering everything and I think this year finally tips me over one thousand hours,” he said.
Having always been a big supporter of Holy Fools’ CEO Neal Taylor, Cr Heenan said the FreezeOut! has been another great show of community support to help raise funds to keep the organisation operating.
“This is the first time I might say I’ve ever asked in 14 years for people to sponsor and to donate money, it’s usually all about awareness, it’s been awareness 100 per cent of the time but organisations like Holy Fools now are doing it tough.
“It’s going to a good cause. There’s a lot of organisations that do work in this sector around our area in Lilydale but no one like Holy Fools and they just don’t get the money from the government grants.”
Cr Heenan said this year his message to the community is to ‘help those who help those in need’ because without them “the situation’s 20 times worse”.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s a church group, whether it’s Holy Fools, or whether it’s the Dandenong Ranges Emergency Relief Service, or the lovely lady Kate with ADRA in Warburton, help those who help those in need.”
Despite feeling the cold each night he is out there, Cr Heenan said it is a good representation of what people sleeping rough have to go through all winter perhaps.
“It’s been a little bit difficult over the years with the freezing cold but it’s all in relation obviously to what people have to put up with.
“When it has been zero degrees or minus one or two, it’s helped the situation much more because people can see it. I go home, I go back to my bed after this period of time but there are real people out there who die of exposure because they’re sleeping rough
“They might be able to do it for two or three years but Neal’s got examples where he’s lost people that he’s been helping where unfortunately the medical condition of those people has just got too much and they’ve passed away by sleeping rough.”
Cr Heenan said in 2015 it was becoming “glaringly obvious” that the majority of people sleeping in cars were women.
“More and more women with children, on some occasions, had to actually sleep in cars and now they’re starting to say, the most emerging group is the over 50s women.
“That was emerging eight years ago and either people just didn’t want to see, or they didn’t want to accept it but we have to face the reality of what’s going on at the moment.”
As a member of the council, Cr Heenan said he hopes changes to the way housing is built can start from a municipality level.
“We’ve really got to build something, we’ve got to get on doing it and local government plays a big part in that. I hope with our next housing strategy we’re going to be able to look to do more than just advocating.”
There’s still time to support the FreezeOut! Challenge, either by taking part yourself or donating to the cause.
To find out more, donate or register, go to www.freezeout.org.au
