As he has helped to do for more than two decades, Stephen Ash led a group of volunteers, parents and students who were sleeping outside to bring attention to homelessness. But while the cardboard town and burning barrel was the same, this year’s event contained a few significant upgrades.

The first came last week, at meetings of the Town of Tonawanda’s town board and Village of Kenmore’s board of trustees. Those governing bodies recognized Friday night as a “community school day of caring and sharing to help people in need,” as they do each year. But this year the proclamations were made permanent.

That development is the first step of a long journey that Ash hopes will end with the day being recognized internationally. He has contacted the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in an effort to promote the effort to expand the event and was told he needs an entire country to get on board before the movement can begin. For a grassroots group like Educators Totally Committed, that’s a tall order.

“It’s a long process, as you can imagine,” Ash said.

But he’s not discouraged. When he was turned away internationally, he started looking national. A representative from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s office said to get anything moving on that scale, Ash would need a handful of governors to make statewide recognitions. To work on Gov. David Paterson’s office, Ash drafted Town Supervisor Anthony Caruana and Village Mayor Patrick Mang. Letters from those two leaders are the start, and the group is hoping to work into Buffalo for even more pull.

“This brings us a little more sway, having them on board,” Ash said.

In the meantime, the movement to hold fundraising and awareness-spreading events is slowly expanding on its own accord. Jerry Starr, who founded the sleepout event in Ken-Ton in 1988, has a son working in the Clarence school district, which has started its own sleepout event. Ash said he thinks the Roy-Hart district is holding its own event this year as well.

But this year in the cafeteria at Hoover Middle School, before the students bedded down in their boxes and gathered around their fire for the night, ETC had another addition to the night. Representatives from five different agencies geared toward aiding and protecting the area’s homeless spoke to let the crowd know where their donations were going and how much more is really needed.

Sister Barbara Pfohl, who works with the Heart and Soul Food Pantry and Kitchen in Niagara Falls, said finding out what the homeless truly need is no easy task. Many are ashamed of where they are. Others are skeptical of people asking too many questions.

“You don’t get their story all at once,” Pfohl said. “You don’t get their story for a while.”

Once the workers charged with helping the homeless make enough of a connection to gain an understanding of those in need, Kristin Cipollone of the Homeless Alliance of Western New York said the root causes can be surprising. Commonly held notions that the homeless are lazy, they’re drug addicts and they’re criminals often go right out the window. Deacon Bob Bauer, of the Little Portion Friary, said it’s important — especially for children — to understand that an ever-greater percentage of the homeless were average people living average lives just a few days before.

“We’re getting more and more people who had an apartment, had a job, and lost it,” Bauer said.

Donations are a necessary component of helping the less fortunate, but people willing to volunteer are in even shorter supply. Groups need people to make the meals, stock the shelves and deliver the clothes that make a difference.

Keeping those efforts in the public eye is also a necessary component. One example discussed Friday focused on how aid flowed freely to Haiti in the days following the recent catastrophic earthquake like never before, even though Haiti had millions of people living in miserable abject poverty long before the disaster. Cipollone said there are thousands living in our own country — in our own cities — who don’t get the resources they need because society’s misconceptions and their own shame renders them invisible.

That’s exactly what Ash and others are out to combat, hoping that one day the country’s leaders will unite behind a single day to push the problem into the spotlight and shake loose the potential for kindness inside everyone lucky enough to have a warm bed and hot supper each night.

“I’d love to get a national day before I kick out of this planet,” Ash said.

Contact reporter Daniel Pye at 693-1000, ext. 158.