Ky. man lives outside for a week to raise awareness for homelessness

JESSAMINE COUNTY, Ky. (WKYT) - Starting today and for the next seven days, a Jessamine County man will intentionally live in an uninsulated dilapidated shack. He’ll stick it out with a thin mattress and little food.

Johnny Templin is living in this uninsulated dilapidated shack that has been moved to the front of the Jessamine County Library.

“Yeah, so this will be my home for the next week right here, plyboard bed structure and a little four-inch mattress,” Templin said. “as you can see there’s nothing standard about this if we get a good rain we’ll see a couple of holes where it will leak through there.”

He’s a little more than six feet tall, in tight quarters.

“Not very comfortable unless I push that wall in. I’ll be sleeping basically like this,” Templin said.

Templin is actually the founder and the executive director of the Jessamine County Homeless Coalition. He’s using this week of the Bluegrass Good Giving Challenge to highlight homeless issues in Nicholasville and the services the community provides. He’s using the shack as a symbol.

“It’s a representation of somebody that might be homeless or living in some sort of substandard type of living,” Templin said.

If you think homelessness is a big city issue, think again. Templin says, of the 31,000 people living in Nicholasville, 26 people are living in this homeless shelter he supervises on maple street. In all 48 people in the city are considered homeless.

Wilmore, another city in Jessamine County, with a population of 6,000, counts 12 people homeless.

Dawnshell Wold has lived in Wilmore for six years. She says she wouldn’t think her small town would have a homeless problem.

“I wouldn’t, but, there is, we run into that quite often here. We see a lot of families here who are at the community center kind of digging around the trash over there,” Wold said.

Templin hopes his week-long stretch in the shack will help expand the current homeless shelter to a 10,000-square-foot building that could hold 80 people. He says during his stay he’ll only eat protein bars and anything the community will give him.

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