Diversity on Campus brings homelessness to the Hill

By Julianne Earle

Just two weeks ago, Stonehill College held its first-ever panel on homelessness to educate the student body about the stigma and struggles surrounding the social justice issue.

The event was put on by Diversity on Campus, represented by Stonehill senior and club President, Love Boussiquot, in the hopes of broadening the understanding that many students have of what homelessness looks like. 

“I feel like a lot of students, myself included – we just come from such a privileged place and we need to know it could be us and could happen to anyone,” Boussiquot said.

Two attendees, Marissa Moniz and Bethany McNamara, agreed that the program was necessary to combat stereotypes students may have on campus.

“Homelessness has a negative stereotype, and I want to educate myself to not fall into that stereotype,” Moniz said.

McNamara agreed that the event was something anyone could benefit from, primarily because it was “honest and raw about how much homelessness sucks.”

The event began just after 7 p.m. in the Martin Institute, and about 30 people attended.

Paul Sullivan, a 65-year-old man from Boston, Massachusetts, who found himself homeless at the age of 55, was the first speaker.  

“I kept saying to myself, ‘This can’t be happening to me,’” Sullivan said.

Sullivan was living in Houston, Texas, with his wife and step-children, when unexpectedly, his wife passed away and his children moved to live with their biological father.  Finding himself alone, Sullivan moved back to the Northeast to live with family and eventually checked into a homeless shelter.

Sullivan said he was assaulted on his first night of homelessness, resulting in a fractured breastbone and multiple fractured ribs. Sullivan was homeless for a total of two years.

The Boston-native also described the stigma surrounding homelessness in the hopes of changing how people address the subject in general.

“People look through you like you don’t exist when you’re homeless. There’s this whole stigma about it. So I kept trying not to look like a homeless person,” Sullivan said.

Following Sullivan, 22-year-old Jamila Bradley of Brighton, Massachusetts, told the story of her journey through homelessness on the streets of Boston.

A former district manager for American Apparel, Bradley was hospitalized for three weeks after surviving a rape attack by three men. Soon after being discharged from the hospital, Bradley found herself unable to make payments on her apartment, finding herself homeless.

“I went to a shelter on Pine Street, and they told me I looked too clean, so I almost wasn’t allowed in. Then when they did let me in, I was physically assaulted by a woman in the shelter,” Bradley said.

Bradley was homeless, sleeping in Harvard Square, for a total of seven months, and eventually worked her way out of it through a local organization, Youth on Fire.

Homelessness can happen to anyone at any time – it does not discriminate.

“You don’t process the worst case scenarios. Our world just doesn’t work like that. Don’t go around telling people you came to this homelessness thing – no. Fuck you. No. Process this – it can happen to you too,” Bradley said.