A Human Dream continued


Far away, at the foot of the majestic Teton mountain range, Habitat staff and volunteers in Jackson Hole, Wyo., participated in an MLK event of another kind. AmeriCorps/ VISTA members Carin Cusick and Mills Davis took on the planning of the day as their first project when they joined Habitat for Humanity of the Greater Grand Teton Area.

“We thought of MLK Day as an important day,” says Cusick, “and that it would be great to have people out remembering Martin Luther King Jr. while doing something good for the community.”

“We had talked about it before and had tried to organize it, but it always sort of snuck up on us,” says executive director Terri Marino. “The service organization AmeriCorps does a good job of promoting MLK Day, and we got a whole lot of encouragement to plan something. And since that was a day off for all of our staff, we said let’s just make it a ‘day on.’ That’s how the idea was born.”

The idea became reality when a group of 20 staff members and volunteers gathered on a sunny morning to help complete and paint the interior of a Habitat house. “It was really, really cold — like 15 below that day — but we were just a bunch of people, and we were just cooking,” Marino recalls.

Grand Teton is planning a similar work day this January, with two houses under construction at the same site offering various volunteer opportunities. “We’ll definitely do it again,” says Marino. “I mean, there’s a lot of people talking about justice on that day, but how many people necessarily make that connection to housing? That everyone deserves a decent place to live? I think we were able to talk about that message. It got a really warm response.”

Another mountain city, Asheville, N.C. — a community of 70,000 that sits in an Appalachian valley near the Smoky Mountains — also had its first MLK Day event in January 2007. Asheville Area Habitat development director Jim Lowder is a member of an organization called Christians for a United Community, formed in recent years, he explains, “with the purpose of helping to facilitate greater understanding among diverse groups from different racial and cultural backgrounds.” He saw an immediate opportunity for collaboration. The affiliate had been considering an MLK Day event after hearing about other affiliates’ efforts, and “I thought we could get [CUC] involved in a Habitat build that would help their mission as well as our mission,” he says.

Asheville Area Habitat received funding for the MLK house from two CUC member churches and solicited volunteers from among the organization’s membership. “One of our goals,” says Lowder, “was to not only do this in name, but to try and promote a lot of diversity in our volunteers corps. We really worked hard at getting volunteers from African-American churches, from predominantly white churches, from Latino churches, to come out to the construction site — in mixed groups, not separately, to have as many interracial, multicultural groups volunteering on site. I don’t know how successful we were in that larger goal. We did make that effort, and I think we have increased the number of African-American individuals in particular who are volunteering on our construction sites.”

Ground was broken on the Asheville MLK home Jan. 16, and teams of volunteers completed construction in the spring; in mid-July, a crowd of CUC members and Habitat volunteers came together to celebrate with homeowner Michelle Muckelvene as her house was dedicated. It’s a scene Lowder would like to see repeated. Now that their first MLK house is complete, Asheville Area Habitat, he says, looks forward to a future build, hopefully another collaboration with CUC.

Habitat for Humanity Philadelphia has a long-standing MLK Day tradition, with eight years of events. For 2008, the affiliate has decided to branch out its efforts. “What we’re looking to do this year is offer home repair,” explains director of development and public relations Stephanie Thaw, “and this is a little bit of a pilot project for us.

“Because of the way we acquire property in the city,” she continues, “a lot of the neighborhoods that we are building in are much older and the communities have suffered from disenfranchisement for quite some time. We see all of these houses around the ones that we are building that are just in really poor shape. So as a gesture of goodwill, we decided that we would offer repair for this day.”

Thaw explains that the 25 approved participants in their upcoming MLK work day must meet the same guidelines required of prospective partner families and must have the types of tasks that can be completed in one day: minor electrical repairs, leaky roofs, new railing installation, basement stair repair.

“I think that we had gotten a little comfortable,” Thaw says. “I think this year is really going to push us in some directions that we really need to be pushed in.

“What Martin Luther King envisioned for us in terms of the world and the community is sort of what Habitat is about,” she adds. “It’s about being the best people we can be, sharing whatever resources we have.”

In many of the locations where Habitat affiliates participate in MLK Day events, the connections made on the holiday builds continue. Not long after the event in Hollywood, S.C., for example, Heyward decided to run for mayor, a position she currently holds. Part of her platform was a commitment to addressing affordable housing issues in Hollywood and finding ways to continue to work with Habitat. “It’s blossoming into a really nice thing for the town,” she says. “Everyone on council recently agreed unanimously to extend the possibilities for Habitat to come into the town and to do whatever we can to help.”

Both sides feel that the relationship forged in the lead-up to their January day of community service is long-lasting. “What a wonderful way for our grand entrance, if you will, into a new community, for house No. 1 over there to be something of this magnitude,” says Swenson. “And actually, it’s just gotten even better since then. This was a just perfect fit.”