Notes from the Road: Family Self Sufficiency

I had the opportunity to visit with Stride today. Located just north of Alameda and Sheridan in Lakewood, Stride has been helping families (90% are single parent) achieve economic self sufficiency for 16 years. They take the long term approach to helping a family move from poverty ($18,000 per year for a family of four) to financial independence. Stride assigns caseworkers to a family for three years to help them permanently exit from the poverty cycle. The Stride program provides some initial money for removing emergency finanical needs but then focuses on providing the family with someplace to go (transitional housing) and connections to services, education and jobs, etc. What impresses me is their very high success rate (500 families served with 70% staying out of poverty). The three year commitment is what they feel it takes for a family to become self sufficient. The leverage can be huge as the grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren are all effected in a positive way and for the long term! Visit www.stride-co.org to see how you can help a proud family get on its feet again. As many of you realize, there is a very fine line (much finer than we often think) between the "haves" and "have nots". It doesn't take much (a medical condition leading to huge bills, a lost job, divorce, etc.) to land someone in a difficult predicament financially.

- Jesse

Habitat House: warmer weather makes all the difference!

You may have read about the Community Shares’ staff Habitat experience on Thursday, February 1 – it was cold, grey and started snowing at about 2:30 pm. Even with longjohns on under our jeans and ski socks, we were still cold and shaking. I wasn’t sure if this was for me – at least not in February! However, the weather took a turn for the better, and after volunteering on Thursday, Saturday was absolute heaven. The weather was warm, the sun was shining and there was a very productive energy in the air.

The weather was only part of what made volunteering Saturday a wonderful and satisfying experience. The volunteers were all my friends – I recruited, and they came. (Does “If you build it, they will come” apply here?) Many of the crowd already knew each other. Those that didn’t were quickly welcomed and by the end of the day, we were all sharing jokes about the movie “Talladega Nights.”

Everyone donned their fancy safety goggles and hard hats, and this time, we actually put the correct names on our hard hats. (Kyle had the name “Mary” on his hat on Thursday and never responded when people called him that name!) We figured out that if you take off your stocking cap and wear your hardhat directly on your head, it doesn’t fall off as easily when you lean over. There is a lot of leaning over when you are hammering window frames, door frames and wall frames! (And since all of the subflooring was secured down, I couldn’t lose my hardhat in the crawl space, as I had on Thursday.)

Seven wall frames were built, and six of those had to have windows and/or doors put into them. Again, very satisfying to start with just subflooring at the beginning of the day and end the day with 7 walls up – ok, 6 walls and one wall frame -- satisfying nonetheless.

Part of what also made it such a great day is the supervisors that are employed by Habitat – they are not only skilled in home construction, but they are really good at working with people like me who don’t use a hammer on a regular basis and who have no idea how to read a home blueprint design. It takes a special kind of person to get 5 giggly women – two with gorgeous fingernails – to use all of their arm strength to build frames and lift up heavy pieces of plywood. Many of us had sore arms the next day. At one point, the side of the duplex with the most women volunteers had more walls up than our guy friends on the other side – and we made sure to point that out to them.

As I wrap up, I want to once again thank my friends for all of their hard work and incredible energy. Thanks also to the Habitat guys – Spencer, Brady and Adam, who put up with our silly jokes all day, and still motivated us to build 7 walls from scratch. Thanks to Habitat for all the good work they do, and for providing this opportunity.

- Mary