ONEIDA — Karing Kitchen Coordinator Melissa King has conducted an annual event — spending a night outside — for years to raise awareness for the plight of the homeless.

This year, she had guests.

Oneida Scout Troop #2 and Keegan Richie, a member of the Madison County Health Department, were there to join King for her recent sleepout in front of the First United Methodist Church.

“The only people I’ve ever had join me for the whole night are my children and once my girls had their children, they said they couldn’t sleep out anymore and I understand,” King said. “But it’s so exciting (to have company) because I think there are more people becoming aware.”

King said she knows she can’t solve the problem, but she can help raise awareness and bring solutions to the table. So one of her efforts is to sleep out in the cold to make people uncomfortable.

“People always ask ‘Are you really doing that?’ or why I don’t do it during the summer,” she said. “Because we’re not having this conversation during the summer. People realize how uncomfortable it is for me to sleep out in that tent and if it’s uncomfortable for me, then they understand how uncomfortable it is for people who live that way.”

Richie said he wasn’t there representing the Madison County Health Department and was instead there as a Christian and a member of the community.

“This is a great cause to support and bring awareness to,” he said. “There are people in the community that don’t necessarily have outlets or avenues to help them. And we can do things to combat that.”

Scout Master Ken Stoker said the scouts try to sleep out once a month and had been invited to join King this year. And to make it more unique, the scouts slept out in cardboard boxes that had been donated from Thompson Appliance in Oneida.

“I work in Syracuse and you can see the homeless carrying their home on their back. It’s all they got,” he said. “This is drawing attention to what they’re going through.”

Stoker said that while some of the scouts had slept out before, it was the first time for some. It was all smiles and laughs as scouts set up their cardboard cities, but with temperatures still cold and near freezing, Stoker was prepared for when it set in.

“I’ve got some extra supplies to make sure we all get through the night,” he said.

King said she felt that subzero day in February really woke up Madison County as people realized just how cold it was for them meant it was even colder for the homeless.

“Not having a homeless shelter in the county makes it hard,” she said. “It would have been ideal to have a shelter and bus people there.”

Homelessness takes many different forms and King recounted the plight of one person she knew who worked full-time and was previously homeless.

“They’ve been working for the last 10 years, but would never share with their employer that they were previously homeless,” she said. “Because they said they ‘definitely know’ their employer would look at them differently and say they made poor choices and question their choices in the future. And it doesn’t matter this was in the past, [people] still have that mentality.”

More than anything, King wants to break down barriers and start having more conversations. And King is seeing change.

“Recently, I read stories to classes at St. Patrick’s School and I read a true story about homelessness called ‘Same Kind of Different as Me’,” she said. “In each class, I tried to have an age-appropriate conversation about homelessness. And one student said something that stuck with me: ‘It doesn’t mean they’re hopeless.’”

“It taught my heart,” King said. “Homeless, not hopeless. Our homeless population struggles, but they still have hope. Because they know people are fighting for them.””