This year’s Shanty Town will be different due to the participation of other Registered Student Organizations.

The program will include soup, bands, speakers, coffee and hot chocolate for the groups that will be sleeping overnight. Shanty Town is put on by the campus chapter of Habitat for Humanity to raise money for National Hunger week.

Two years ago, the event fundraised between $400 and $500 according to the Oct. 1, 2004 edition of The Daily Eastern News.

“Billons of people live in substandard housing,” said Roy Lanham, the Newman Catholic Center’s campus minister, who serves as the adviser for Eastern’s chapter Habitat for Humanity.

Shanty Town is also a place to raise awareness on inadequate housing for those less fortunate.

“Some people don’t have the same opportunities,” Lanham said

Shanty Town is a small village constructed in the Library Quad to simulate poor living conditions. Students can spend Sunday night in Shanty Town experience poverty for themselves until Monday morning. Most students won’t stay the whole night due to coldness or classes in the morning and will go back to their rooms at 2 a.m.

“Reality, we can go back (home), but (for) a lot of people this is how it is,” Lanham said.

This is the third year Shanty Town has taken place in the fall. “It’s not a group of students camping,” Lanham said.

This year students are asked to vote from Sunday to Tuesday on the best shanty, according to Lanham, by putting coins in the front of the shanty.