“Being homeless does not define a person, it’s just the state of where they’re currently at in their life. These people had lives before this, and they still have lives and friends and family that care about them,” said Lucia Bonacchi ‘20, on what the Labre Project hopes to inform JCU students of with Homelessness Awareness Week.

Lucia Bonacchi, president of the Labre Project at John Carroll University, joined the organization in her first year. She said she wanted to get involved with service to the extent she was in high school.

“I’ve been involved with the Labre project for four years. The first Friday of freshman year I started, and just fell in love with it and the people that we see, and just decided to continue.

“Labre, or the Labre Project, comes from St. Benedict Joseph Labre, who is the patron saint of homelessness. He actually decided to leave his life and go live among the homeless in order to minister to them. So we take our name from him and hope that we are able to emulate him through our outreach with those experiencing homelessness.”

The Labre Project at JCU began in 2004 and occurs each Friday night, when a group of students drive to different locations around Cleveland to give food and clothes to those experiencing homelessness.

Bonacchi went on to explain how Labre is different from other service projects. “We say that there’s the service of being and the service of doing. We put our efforts into the service of being, in that the first and foremost important part of Labre is just that we are there, being friends with them. Giving out food and clothes are all secondary compared to the relationships that we build and the dignity we try to give back to them.”

This week, the JCU Labre Project is sponsoring Homelessness Awareness Week on campus, featuring a different activity each day to bring attention to those currently experiencing homelessness.

“During our meetings for Labre, we were discussing how we really wanted to do some sort of advocacy project and really try to get our name out there, and get more people involved with Labre, and also just get more people aware of homelessness in Cleveland because there’s such a huge population,” Bonacchi said.

The timing of Homelessness Awareness Week was also very intentional, explained Bonnachi. “We wanted it to be the week before Thanksgiving, because this is a time that we go into the holidays, and there’s a lot of excess and waste, and a lot of people wanting instead of saying, like, ‘What do I have and how can I help others?’ So we really wanted to just draw people’s attention toward the service aspect of the holidays, and being grateful for what you have.”

Each day of the week, Monday through Friday, has featured an activity for John Carroll students that will hopefully raise awareness for those experiencing Homelessness around Cleveland.

“For each day of the week, we wanted it to go deeper and deeper,” said Bonnachi. The activities will culminate in the weekly Labre event on Friday evening.

“For Monday, we decided to do something very hands-on for the first activity, so we did a blanket-making event. This was something that was just kind of fun for the first day, and the blankets will be distributed throughout the upcoming weeks,” Bonacchi explained.

Tuesday’s event was an evening prayer service in Rodman chapel. “We are really just getting together to pray for those that we see on the streets, and just reflect on homelessness in general and what we can do to help those people.

“We have different cards that we’ve written up, each with a different person’s circumstances. We never want to say the name or the place of a person, just because that’s how they’re known and that’s their identity, and we want to be respectful toward that. So we have the situation of a person, on the prayer card, that someone during the prayer service will be specifically designated to pray for during the service,” said Bonacchi.

The prayer service also included Father Bernie McAniff blessing the blankets created Monday.

Wednesday’s event was an information session in the student center atrium, with different statistics about homelessness in Cleveland. “We’re actually putting up signs in the atrium that are cardboard, so like, what a panhandling sign would look like, with information on it,” Bonacchi explained.

On Thursday, the day of JCU’s annual Cafsgiving, Labre will host Jeanine Vandergriff, a woman currently experiencing homlessness, to give a talk. “She previously had a huge marketing position with a big corporation, and she ended up becoming homeless. She really likes to talk about how easy it is” to fall into homelessness said Bonacchi.

Bonacchi said she hopes Homelessness Awareness Week will lead John Carroll students to develop a deeper sense of gratitude for what they already have, as well as a stronger motivation to get involved with service.

“I think the most important thing is that, so often we walk and ignore the people we see on the streets, and we should realize that those people have dignity and are humans, and feel hurt when people ignore them. A smile or a nod would go a long way.”