Santa Rosa Junior College’s Student Government Assembly approved at it’s Nov. 1 meeting $1,000 for giveaways at its upcoming Sleep Out event.
To bring awareness to increasing homelessness in Sonoma County and among the SRJC student body, the Sleep Out event challenges participants to spend a night sleeping as many homeless residents and students do: in a car, tent or on a couch. The $1,000 will be used to encourage student participation. Donations of socks and tarps will also be accepted during the event.
“The homelessness in Sonoma County is insane, and we need to bring awareness to that,” Student Body President Delashay Carmona Benson said. “We just had that flood last week, and there were people outside sleeping in that flood. When we have fires going on, there’s people outside sleeping, nowhere to go. When we have our basic needs every month, there’s people outside without their basic needs.”
The flyer for the Sleep Out event will be in this week’s Bearfacts newsletter.
SGA also approved a measure to continue meeting virtually for the remainder of the county’s state of emergency declaration.
Carl Tennenbaum, a 2022 candidate for Sonoma County Sheriff scheduled to speak at the meeting, was unable to attend. Instead, Henry Huong, who plans to run for city council in November 2022, gave a short speech and answered questions about his upcoming campaign.
Huong, who is originally from Chicago, says his platform would run on principles of diversity and inclusion. Huong spoke about his goal to bring in new economic growth to Sonoma County.
“As a young person [the] only future you have is in this community, as it stands, is in the wine business, tourism, some types of [agriculture], but we don’t have any tech jobs. There’s just not a lot of jobs available,” Huong said. “And we need to be more diverse in order to attract those types of companies to come to our community. I mean, that’s my main objective. To bring in new businesses.”
