What comes to mind when you hear the word homeless? Do you picture someone in dirty clothes sleeping in a cardboard box?
What if you found your stereotypes are wrong?
“Homelessness in most people’s eyes is living in a box or a tent because that’s what you see in the movies and big cities,” said Brandi Herrington, executive director for Starkville Strong, a local nonprofit that seeks to help with the homeless situation. “But in the rural south, it’s couch surfing or you just can’t afford your rent anymore. We have people in cars or just from house to house to house, staying wherever they can for a night or two. … So, homelessness here looks different. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not here.”
One way the group seeks to address the problem is by educating the public.
This is where students from the community-based planning course at Mississippi State come in.
“They were tasked with developing a tool that engages the community on a planning topic,” said Abbey Wallace, instructor for the class. “The tool that they created was one that addresses housing in Starkville.”
The students created a board game called “Housing Hustle” which looks to place players in the roles of people one might find in Starkville to help better understand the struggles that many face. Using an online game the students found as a basic framework, they applied scenarios that would be found in Starkville.
“The game is kind of a vision in education,” said Luke Tillery, one of the students who worked on the project. “It is to teach people, along the lines of the online tool, the difficulties of kind of how random it is, luck of the draw. The way the game works is you start off with a specific character and it’s completely random. So, you could be someone who struggles a lot financially and is placed in a difficult situation, or you could be someone who could easily get through the game.”
The game is similar to “The Game of Life”, a popular board game.
It sends players along the board with different opportunities and hazards along the way.
Chance cards are incorporated, and they can be good, such as a bonus at work, or bad, such as car repairs.
“It throws in a lot of the realities of life,” said Carly Shows, another student. “A lot of times it’s not very good and if you start off having a low income, those negative chances thrown at you put you in a cycle of not being able to get anywhere.”
The students didn’t just set to making a game though. They first heavily researched the topic at hand to get a better understanding of what the specific issues were and what was already being done to address them.
“Our goal was to use agencies or groups that are actually trying to address the problem because they know exactly what is happening,” Tillery said.
Starkville Strong was a key aspect of the research process.
“One of the main ones we looked at was Starkville Strong and all of the different areas they are helping out in the community,” Shows said.
“We based a lot of our research off of those numbers that they have already found through their own research and then compile that together. We finalized it with other case studies in other towns.”
In addition to the game, the students also developed an interactive survey that works alongside the game.
It places people in a hypothetical situation of someone who is homeless in Starkville.
“One of the goals is to kind of bring down to Earth that the homeless in Starkville are people that are just among us,” said Walter Hogue, who worked on developing the survey. “It’s easy to categorize that group of people, whether it’s someone viewing it as someone dangerous or mentally unstable. It’s easy to have categories and preset positions about homeless people and not realize the difficult situations in life that bring people to that and how it can be anyone.”
The survey is not quite complete, but Hogue said they hoped to go live with it in a few days.
Looking to the future
The students held the first trial of their game at The Discovery Center in Starkville on Thursday.
The goal was to have other students and community members play through to gauge the response as well as find any areas that need improvement.
The ultimate goal is for the game to be developed as a tool for groups like Starkville Strong to use to educate people on homelessness in Starkville.
“This project is the beginning of what we hope will be a recurring event that we can do with schools or with the leadership of Starkville, with church groups or anybody who asks the questions like, ‘Why do they need extra food?’ ‘Why do they need gas to get to work sometimes?’” said Herrington. “This immersive experience will help the community to better understand, which will allow Starkville Strong to help make that connection of need with the Starkville community.”
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 36 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.