Waypoint SleepOut 2025

Description

In its 11th year, SleepOut raises community awareness and funds to support essential services for young people who are experiencing homelessness in New Hampshire.

Here is how you can help.

• Be an Advocate: Volunteer to SleepOut and become an Advocate for ending youth homelessness. Advocates are given tools to help obtain pledges from friends and colleagues to support a fundraising goal of at least $100 and meet or exceed it.
• Organize a Team of Advocates: Gather a group of colleagues, friends and family for a collective effort to support this cause, and your organization may match the funds raised by participants. Promotional tools are provided to make it easy to coordinate a Team.
• Become a Corporate Sponsor: Encourage your company to sponsor SleepOut 2025. Recognition and benefits are commensurate with the level of sponsorship. Check out our 2024 sponsors.
• Donate: Through an online portal, you can contribute to SleepOut 2025 directly or support an Advocate or a Team. Prefer Venmo? You can donate to SleepOut through Venmo also.

Each year an estimated 15,000 young people experience homelessness in the state. Through SleepOut, our participants serve as Advocates and spend a night outside in the cold each March to stand in solidarity with these young people. SleepOut supports New Hampshire’s only low-barrier emergency youth shelter and safe space located in Manchester, youth drop-in centers in Manchester and Rochester, and a range of support services that lead to long-term stability.

Instead of sleeping outside together as a public demonstration of support for youth experiencing homelessness, advocates participating in SleepOut 2025 will sleep remotely outside. This change is necessary as a direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in July 2024 regarding Grants Pass vs. Johnson which allows municipalities to criminalize sleeping in public places.

An in-person gathering will take place at Bronstein Park in Manchester on March 21 followed by remote SleepOuts at a location of choice for our Advocates across the Granite State. Advocates and Teams who volunteer will raise financial support for Waypoint’s Homeless Youth and Young Adult programs and services through a peer-to-peer fundraising model and sponsorship.