Tent City Highlights
Homeless Families

City inspector Rafael Ramos (pictured) wasn’t tracking down slumlords on Thursday night . Instead, he was setting up tents on the Green, lickety split. He’s good at that, too, having had lots of practice taking 50 or 60 kids camping every summer for the past nine years.

The tents were needed for Tent City on the Green, the city’s third annual community event to raise money for homeless shelters.

This year the money is going to shelter children and families instead of the city’s men-only overflow shelter as in the past two years. (Funding for that was included in the city budget this year.)

Not only was the money being raised Thursday night to help homeless kids. Young people were major contributors and a huge presence at the event. Along with the usual city agencies, churches and not-for-profits, a middle school (Elm City College Prep, pictured), two high schools (Metropolitan Business Academy and Common Ground) and two colleges (SCSU and Yale) all had representatives there and raised hundreds of dollars for the cause.

Students from Common Ground (pictured) prepared an almost unimaginable amount of squash soup from vegetables they raised on their farm this season. SCSU students handed out cocoa.

City Community Services Administrator Dr. Chisara Asomugha (“I’m Dr. Chi,” was how she introduced herself on stage) noted that homelessness cuts across all demographics. ​“Statistics are showing that the fastest growing population [of the homeless] are families headed by women,” she said.

Michael Mills and Rhythms from the Heart kept the beat going with help from some very young drummers (pictured). The award-winning Nation drill team stepped through smartly choreographed paces for a 15-minute performance.

Bonita Grubbs, executive director of Christian Community Action, said any funds raised would be most welcome. ​“One of the things that’s always a challenge is to be able to provide sheltering for people in a manner that really is decent and dignified. So with the economy the way it is, it’s much more difficult to provide a decent place. Furnishings and the like are always needed,” she said. CCA serves 60 families a year in its shelter and 25 a year at Stepping Stone, its transitional housing program. Unique among shelters in New Haven, CCA programs serve bigger families, two-parent families and male heads of household families, along with the more numerous female-headed households.

Asomughasaid the total turned in by the start of Tent City was $15,000; she expected the city would reach its goal of $20,000. (That’s half the goal of the first year, held in better economic times.)

The event is always such an enjoyable community builder that one wonders whether it could continue if, in a perfect world, the shelters had all the money they need.