Town’s Annual ‘Sleep Outs’ Have Raised Millions for Needy

In this handsome, well-heeled town on the shores of Lake Minnetonka, the main street is lined with trendy boutiques and bistros, and sailboats bob off a meandering shoreline. Money magazine recently named Wayzata — population 4,113 — as a contender in its annual ranking of best place in America to live. What a century ago was a sleepy resort village catering to train-borne day-trippers from Minneapolis, some 12 miles to the east, has grown into a wealthy suburb of rambling homes and shiny SUV’s.

It’s one of the last places you’d expect homelessness to be an issue of grave concern. But on this soggy November evening, with a brooding sky emitting a mix of rain and sloppy snowflakes, and a nippy breeze sweeping in off the lake, homelessness has brought hundreds of Wayzatians downtown.

The event is the kickoff of the 10th annual Sleep Out, a fund-raising campaign wherein over the next few weeks dozens of local citizens, from the mayor on down, will sleep outdoors in all manner of abodes, including pup tents and cardboard boxes, as a means to raise awareness that not everyone in these parts beds down nightly in a lakefront mansion.

Interfaith Outreach & Community Partners, a nonprofit social-services group, runs the event and benefits from the donations Sleep Outers solicit for their efforts. The campaign has raised $4-million over the years, and this season’s goal is $1.5-million.

The issue is serious, but the atmosphere is celebratory.

Boy Scout Troop 283 ladles out free hot apple cider, while church and civic groups distribute cups of chicken soup and foil-wrapped hot dogs. A trio of giggling girls takes donations from atop a lifeguard chair dragged up from the lakefront.

A temporary stage blocking one end of the street is decorated with poster boards bearing hand-scrawled messages: “Everybody deserves a warm place to call home” and “Sleep out so others can sleep in.” A local pastor takes the spotlight to play “When the Saints Go Marching In” on an electronic autoharp.

When U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad takes the stage to rally the crowd, he makes special note of Bob Fisher, an affable and unassuming shoe repairman whom Representative Ramstad calls “the conscience of our community.”

“Shoe Bob,” as he’s known to most in these parts, would likely shrug off such a heady moniker. But it was Mr. Fisher, a ruddy-faced, third-generation cobbler, who, on a chilly November night in 1996, pitched a tent behind his Wayzata home. He crawled inside it a tenderfoot outdoorsman — and crawled out the following morning a budding philanthropist.

Learning to Camp

Today Mr. Fisher, the father of three grown children and grandfather to six, freely admits that altruism was not on his mind when he put up his tent that fateful night 10 years ago.

“I didn’t have an ounce of thought for doing something good,” he says, thinking back. “I simply wanted to learn how to winter camp.”

It proved to be a hard lesson. Mr. Fisher found himself cold and claustrophobic at 2 in the morning. But as he lay there alone, with chattering teeth and numb toes, he had an epiphany. The devout Christian credits the Almighty himself for taking a hand in that night’s events.

“God decided what I was to do,” Mr. Fisher says. “I could almost see and hear his words: I was to move the tent to the front yard and do something for the needy people in Wayzata.”

Cold as he was, he vowed to sleep out in the tent perched prominently in front of his house until he raised $7,000 to buy Thanksgiving dinners for needy families. He didn’t know much about fund raising. He simply took to telling his shoe-repair customers about his scheme. Then a local radio station began talking up the effort. In two weeks’ time, Mr. Fisher was back in his bed and had $10,000 to give away.

He took the money to Interfaith Outreach & Community Partners, which he knew ran a food bank. He recalls how the executive director, LaDonna Hoy, thanked him for the money, and then set him up for a second epiphany.

“She said to me, ‘What would a hot holiday meal do for a family that’s living in their car?’” Mr. Fisher recalls. “I was shocked that there could be homeless right here in Wayzata. It’s such an affluent area. I mean, there might be someone short a BMW payment or something, but there couldn’t be a lot of real need.”

While Wayzata doesn’t have the entrenched street-dwelling homeless population that inhabit many more-urban areas, it does have housing issues.

Tucked among the comfortable homes filling the Twin Cities’ leafy, lake-dotted western suburbs are modest apartments where low-income families often struggle to make the rent. A sudden layoff, a sick child, or a broken-down car can snowball into financial crisis.

Interfaith spends much of its funds striving to prevent homelessness through emergency rent or mortgage assistance to households facing financial straits. As a long-term solution, the charity recently started working with a local developer to help bring 50 new units of affordable housing to the area.

“They hooked me into doing it again the next year,” Mr. Fisher says with a laugh. “But the focus since has been on affordable housing.”

Mr. Fisher credits some of his giving spirit to his experiences growing up as the second of nine children in nearby Anoka, Minn., a town whose more famous son is the public-radio host Garrison Keillor. He recalls how some financial shortfalls once threatened to ruin the Fisher family Christmas — until generous neighbors burst through the door on Christmas Eve, their arms full of gifts.

Over the past nine years and nine Sleep Outs, Mr. Fisher has spent the equivalent of seven months in his tent, enduring subzero nights and double-digit snowfalls.

Each year the fund-raising goal grows larger and the participant list more diverse.

Local politicians and business leaders have taken to tents; Minnesota Twins baseball players have as well. Companies and banks have begun staging sleep-out weekends for their employees. Some folks spend only a night or two outdoors, while others go hard-core, roughing it out until the year’s fund-raising goal is met.

Among the hardy souls sleeping out is Zachary Verbick, 17. “I do it for the same reasons Bob does,” the high-school junior says. “There’s a need.”

Mr. Verbick was only 10 when he first took to a tent for the Sleep Out. During the week, it’s a matter of finishing up his homework inside, and then scrambling out to his front-yard tent for the evening. He mails letters to his neighbors telling them about the cause and asking for support. Last year they answered with more than $10,000.

“It’s good when it snows because it adds insulation,” Mr. Verbick says with nonchalance, adding that he slept out comfortably on a night when the windchill factor approached 50 below.

$1.5-Million Goal

Last year’s Sleep Out raised more than $1.2-million for Interfaith’s housing programs, a goal that required Mr. Fisher to spend 37 nights in his front-yard tent, his longest stretch yet. Now the goal is $1.5-million, but “Shoe Bob” will not be out in his tent this year. While he might put in a night or two outside, he says, for personal reasons he can’t commit the time this year.

He has also come to feel that it’s time to step back from an event that, until this year, was actually called Bob’s Sleep Out. He’s still an avid ambassador for the concept, having already passed along the Sleep Out idea to church and civic groups around the region. Sleep Outs now take place in Duluth, Minn.; Green Bay, Wis.; several towns in Iowa; and Chicago. Some teenagers from New Zealand even sent e-mail messages to Mr. Fisher about the concept.

“It’s a very flexible idea,” Mr. Fisher says. “I just tell folks what I did. I tell them to take it and do it any way they want.”

He adds: “I really feel the good Lord wants me to spread this message around the country. I have a goal that by the end of 2007, we’ll see something like this in five communities in every state in the nation.”

Back in the rain and wind-swept downtown, the Sleep Out kickoff ends after about an hour. The hot dogs give out, the rain picks up, and most folks troop back to their warm homes. Many, however, are heading off to spend the dank night in a tent or cardboard box.

At St. Philip the Deacon Lutheran Church, in the neighboring town of Plymouth, some 45 teenagers are taking to refrigerator and furniture boxes. Laura Miller, 18, says she and her friends have lashed four boxes together and draped them with a tarp.

“It’s a cardboard condo,” she says enthusiastically.

With this many adolescents together, there’s a goodly amount of socializing and laughter. Spirits here are high. However, Ms. Miller does pause a moment to consider the night ahead, when the last of the giggles die out and the only sound is the wind and rain beating on the flimsy makeshift shelters.

“When I’m alone in my box is when I’ll get sad,” she says. “That’s when I’ll think about people out there who might have to live like this.”