Manchester Community College Plans to Build a 'Cardboard City'

The Habitat for Humanity chapter will sponsor its fifth Cardboard City on May 1 to 2 in front of the SBM Tower on campus.

Students will construct cardboard houses and spend a night in them to raise money and awareness of the reality of homelessness.

The money will be used to help fund the chapter’s eight-day trip to New Orleans in July where they will assist with the ongoing task of rebuilding the city from Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee system failure in 2005. It will be the for advisor Lucy Hurston and the club that she helped start six years ago.

The Cardboard event “brings current affairs into a three dimensional position for the students to make them actively do something to raise awareness about homelessness and to put them in somebody else’s shoes,” according to Hurston.

Construction of the cardboard houses will begin at 7 a.m. on May 1 with The River 105.9 radio on hand, followed by live music provided by MCC’s 41prospect, who will be playing their fourth consecutive Cardboard City. Guest speakers and education videos are also on the evening’s agenda.

The MCC Habitat chapter volunteers their building skills once a month in Hartford, and are an in-demand commodity in New Orleans where people are still living in FEMA trailers without plumbing and electricity nearly six years after the disaster.