In her freshman year, Edgewood High School junior Lindsey Laird learned several important lessons in her first Cardboard City experience, the most important being: Pick out a sturdy box.

“There are a lot of variables,” she said, “like which way the wind is blowing. My box kept falling over on me.”

Tuesday night, Laird was among 85 Edgewood students camping out in boxes on the front lawn of the middle school for the seventh annual installment of Cardboard City, designed to raise awareness of hunger and homelessness — and spark some activism, according to agriculture education instructor Kellie Warner.

Students were asked to raise $75 in donations in order to participate in the event, Warner said. Some raised as much as $500. Going into the event, Warner tallied $15,000. Adding that to the previous six years, Edgewood students have raised over $90,000, she said.

“It all stays in the Edgewood community,” Warner said. “The students sponsor families for Christmas with half of it. We have a relationship with the Edgewood Ministerial Association, who will distribute the other half to families in need throughout the year.”

Although the students are under close supervision, organizers try to make the homeless experience as meaningful as possible. Students must use provided play money to buy the cardboard to build their homes, tarps, tape and blankets. Bins of clean garbage are provided for them to scrounge for food.

Each year, Warner includes some kind of activity to help drive the message home. This year, it was a hunger banquet, playing off the theme “Hunger is Not a Game.”

“Students were assigned to first, second and third world countries and will eat accordingly,” Warner said.

Thirteen students were selected randomly to be able to eat at the concurrent FFA Stop Hunger Spaghetti Dinner, which by itself raised another $1,200 to be donated to the Trenton Food Pantry.

The second-world students dined on a meal of rice and beans. The third world students dined on rice only, plus whatever they were able to forage for.

“Hopefully, it will make them a little angry,” Warner said. “We warned them at the beginning that they would be cold, hungry and angry.”

The Cardboard City residents also listened to guest speakers, including people their own age who have experienced the life of the homeless, provided by SHALOM, a seasonal homeless shelter in Dayton.

Warner said the event is purposefully scheduled for the week of Thanksgiving because having a nice dinner with their families after experiencing Cardboard City will enhance their reflection, and then following through by doing Christmas shopping and wrapping presents for their adopted families makes it that much more meaningful.

“They get emotionally attached to these families they’ve never even met,” Warner said. “It really helps change the way they view the world in some way. It makes them feel like they’re doing something very, very important.”