On the first Saturday night in April, while our college-age friends were preparing for a night on the town, we were preparing for a night in a homeless shelter. While they ate at trendy sushi restaurants and sports bars, we ate spaghetti and meatballs in a dingy cafeteria. While they drank in nightclubs, we offered bottled water to homeless men sleeping under Interstate 95 overpasses.

We did this voluntarily — it wasn’t part of any community service assignment. Along with 25 other college journalists and recent grads from all over Florida, we offered to take over an issue of the second-largest homeless newspaper in the country, the Homeless Voice. The paper is published out of the Coalition of Service and Charity (COSAC) shelter in Hollywood, Fla. To call this place unusual would be a gross understatement.

It is a private shelter run by Sean Cononie, a man with a background in criminal justice and a gift for controlling chaos. His shelter is where the homeless who can’t cut it in other shelters end up. The ones who refuse to take a shower, take their meds, or take orders.

Oddly enough, we felt completely comfortable with them. These weren’t scary people with mental problems, drug addictions or criminal histories. They were regular people — nice people — who were more than happy to let us into their lives.

And we dove in deeply.

In the 10 hours we spent there, we followed a homeless bride and groom through their wedding
day (see page 8). We tagged along with staff members on an outreach mission to give food, water and cigarettes to homeless living on the streets (page 12). We learned of the great lengths that shelter staff members go to ensure the residents’ health and safety — even when it means wrestling a man with
a box cutter (page 4).

Most of all, though, we heard the stories of the people who live there. We listened. We laughed, even cried.

These weren’t the nameless people holding signs asking for money on the side of streets and walking up to car windows. They were people not much different from the rest of us. They had jobs, families and hobbies.

What had begun as a journalism experiment ended with a new outlook on what it means to be homeless — one that would have never occurred to many of us.

This issue is an attempt to capture what we saw that evening. If you are impacted even a fraction as much as we are by what we found out, our all-nighter will have been well worth it.