Boss goes "home" during CEO sleepout - The Canberra Times

For Glen Tibbitts, spending a night sleeping rough felt a little like going home.

He runs his own security company now, employing more than a dozen people, and slept last night with about 140 fellow chief executive officers and bosses in frost-covered sleeping bags in Civic Square for the Vinnies CEO Sleepout.

But the first time he slept on the streets, Mr Tibbitts wasn’t surrounded by community leaders, security fences, and first-aid staff. He was 15 years old, had just escaped an abusive home, and was scared.

“It was very scary, very daunting. I was too scared to do anything, apart from find a hiding hole amongst the bushes and just watch. People with drug problems and alcohol problems and stuff would fight between themselves, and I would just stay in the bushes because I was too scared to let people know I was there,” he said.

“Even the next day, you’d wait until you felt it was safe enough to get out without everybody seeing where you’d got out of.”

It’s been a long, tough road for the 49-year-old, from being a kid on the streets to owning his own business.

Mr Tibbitts spent more than two years as a teenager sleeping rough, when he moved from city to city and saw and lived through a lot of abuse and fear.

When he was about 17, he was allegedly set up by two police officers who placed drug paraphernalia in his clothes and were about to place charges. But as his life teetered on the edge of total disaster, a moment of kindness changed everything.

“The sergeant intervened, and just changed the course of my life right there and then. If they had’ve prosecuted me for that, my life would have been a totally different spiral,” he said.

The sergeant stopped the set-up, then gave Mr Tibbitts some tins of food and an envelope with just $10 and a note of encouraging words.

“The impact of that, his kindness and decency towards me, had at that time – it wasn’t until recently when I reflected back on the memories that I realized how much of an impact he actually had. I wish I knew who he was.”

Mr Tibbitts said from there, with some strategic help from organisations like St Vincent de Paul’s, he was able to slowly turn his life around.

This year, he shared his story with the CEOs at the sleepout, which was no easy task. He said before he got up to speak, he paced up and down, and had to steel himself.

But the support he found afterwards was touching. And while the CEOs weren’t experiencing the gripping fear of a night on the street, he commended them for getting out of their comfort zone, particularly on a night when the temperature fell to minus 3 degrees.

“This is my second year, however in my first year I felt like, in a sense, that I was going home,” he said. “I’ve been here before. You start there, and then you have full [circle], and then you end up back here.”

So far the 2013 CEO Sleepout has raised more than $420,000 for St Vincent de Paul’s in the ACT. ZOO Advertising managing director Clinton Hutchinson is on top of the donation board, followed by a number of public service bosses.

To donate, go to www.ceosleepout.org.au/events/act-sleepout/