Assignment: Build!
Collegiate Challenge program encourages student involvement

As the spring break season gathers momentum, thousands of students across the United States are discovering Habitat for Humanity's paradoxical formula for a rejuvenating vacation: hard, physical labor.

Some 14,000 students volunteered in 2007 through Habitat's Collegiate Challenge program at 225 host affiliates, contributing $1.5 million to those affiliates. Collegiate Challenge is a year-round program offering campus chapters, student organizations, church youth groups and friends the opportunity to spend one week building with a Habitat for Humanity affiliate in the United States. The combination of warming weather and school holidays makes spring break an especially popular time for volunteering.

Besides the funds donated, host affiliates often enjoy less tangible benefits from the students' work as well, such as a new motivation for the regular affiliate volunteers and staff, says associate director of Youth Programs Alynn Woodson. "Additionally, they leave the experience with the knowledge that they have just created new activists for poverty housing issues and long-term Habitat for Humanity supporters," she adds.

For the students, a week of traveling, eating and building together helps relationships to solidify around the common cause of helping a family in need of decent shelter. Cristina Rizzuto, a student at Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York, N.Y., commented, "This trip has reinforced for me how important it is to help others. It felt amazing to know that you could be a part of creating a home for a family that truly needed one."

Slamming One Door, Opening Another
Public awareness campaign calls attention to worldwide housing need

As part of its mission to make poverty housing a matter of conscience and action, Habitat for Humanity is committed to advocating for decent housing in our world. Slam the Door on Poverty Housing is a public awareness campaign developed by Habitat for Humanity International to heighten understanding of poverty housing as a global scandal, to encourage and facilitate individual and collective action to address it, and to raise awareness of Habitat and its programs worldwide.

"Not only are we slamming the door on poverty housing, we are opening the door to a world where every individual has a decent place to live," says Jennifer Lindsey, Habitat senior director of international and advocacy communications. "The Slam the Door/Open the Door campaign is intended to till the soil for advocacy efforts. People must be aware of the problem of poverty housing and care enough to do something about it before they will take action. The intention is to lay the groundwork for other Habitat initiatives that require action--volunteering, advocating and donating."

Elements of the campaign (www.slamthedoor.org) include education efforts and outreach to new and existing Habitat supporters. One component of the campaign is a maze, an opportunity to visually experience the realities of substandard housing through the journey of two young children, each of whom lives in poverty--one in a rural setting and one in an urban setting.

"Through photos and first-person written narrative, the visitor experiences the children's daily existence and the causes and effects of living in substandard housing," Lindsey says. "The visual walk through the maze is accompanied by the sounds of living in the city and countryside, as well as a voiceover with information on poverty housing." The maze has so far appeared on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., at the Jimmy Carter Work Project 2007 in Los Angeles, and at events in New Orleans and Las Vegas.

"These are just the initial steps in a longer-term effort," Lindsey says. The campaign is currently U.S.-based, as Habitat International works with its area offices around the world to introduce a campaign in support of their work.