COMMUNITY HOUSING COALITION OF MADISON COUNTY INC

In 2013 CHC began a local volunteer recruitment and coordination program to assist clients throughout the year. Prior to this program, CHC’s assistance was limited to the summer mission program and thus there were no resources for low-income families needing housing repairs throughout the year.

Before the program began in 2013 clients were only able to receive assistance during the summer mission program and many urgent needs went unmet. The program has increased local volunteer participation from just a handful to nearly 150. In February 2015 CHC kicked off the Neighbors Helping Neighbors Saturday work days to draw in local volunteers and encourage clients to recruit their neighbors and family members to assist with the repairs. The two work days held so far have resulted in 36 individual volunteers donating 190 hours of labor. These in-kind donations were leveraged with $1800 in Urgent Repair Program (URP) funding and utilized CHC’s assessors to provide supervision and training, furthering the capacity of the local volunteers. In 2014, CHC received $100,000 in URP funding because of the successes in leveraging volunteer labor with URP funding. The leveraging of funding and volunteers is vital to CHC as local volunteers need money for materials and the money for materials from URP is available mainly because of the volunteer labor contributions.


The program is also designed to reduce one-way giving and empower clients by providing those CHC serves the encouragement and opportunity to give back to the community - CHC implemented systemic change in the free home repair programs by empowering clients to help themselves and each other in an effort to eliminate toxic charity and limit one-way giving. Rather than simply offering a free service, CHC works with the clients to teach them repair skills and develop resources they can contribute such as organizing friends and family to perform the work and fundraising for repairs. In the first year, CHC clients supplied nearly $20,000 in in-kind labor and resource donations. Research shows that this model is more likely to lead to long term improvement in the client’s lives than one-way giving.