Category Archives: Community

Helping The Children’s Home

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This actually has to do with my day job.  The Triad Apartment Association (TAA) is gearing up for it's annual Labor of Love and this year we'll be working with The Children's Home to fix up a building that's been vacant for over 25 years so that it can be used as transitional housing for kids who turn 18. 

As things currently stand when a child turns 18 they are pretty much on their own.  I don't know about you, but if I'd been left to my own devices at 18 I would have been in a world of hurt.  The Children's Home envisions taking this refurbished building and using it as a place to temporarily house the 18 year-olds while they learn how to make their way in the world.

The TAA is going to take several teams of volunteers to clean up, paint, fix the landscaping and make repairs to the building over two weekends in February.  We're in the process of organizing our teams and gathering supplies for the project.  To give you an idea of the scope of this project we anticipate using a minimum of 200 gallons of paint and having dozens of volunteers on site at any given time. 

One of the most exciting aspects of this project is that we keep getting donations and volunteers by word of mouth even though we haven't really been pushing it to this point.  I can't tell you how many calls we've gotten from "friends of friends" who want to know how they can get involved.  What I've been telling them is that we will happily take donations of supplies, or money (financial donations go directly to The Children's Home for the project), to help with the project.  If we get a duplication of donations, say for kitchen appliances, then we've been assured that The Children's Home can find a use for them.  If you have any interest in helping out please feel free to contact our office at (336) 294-4428 or visit our web page about the project here. 

I wasn't yet at TAA when we did the 2009 Labor of Love so I'm REALLY stoked about this year's project.

 

Cool Winston-Salem Habitat for Humanity Program Involving High School Groups

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I came across this item from a news site in Loudoun County, Virginia and it piqued my interest since that's right down the road from where I lived much of my life before moving to the Winston-Salem area.  Essentially it's a story about 10 high school football players from Park View High School spending a week at the Winston-Salem Habitat for Humanity assisting on some of the houses.  Here are some excerpts:

The Habitat trip began April 5 when the participating players and chaperons departed from Park View. On the drive to Winston-Salem, players were given the opportunity to visit four colleges (Liberty University, Virginia Tech, Winston-Salem State University and Wake Forest University).

After arriving at the Habitat Forsyth office, players were shown their living quarters for the week — a loft above the Habitat Re-Store that featured two large rooms with military-style cots for sleeping, a kitchen, a table tennis room and a living room with a TV and DVD player. Below the loft were bathrooms with showers and a laundry room. While the living facilities were not luxurious, it held an aura of tradition as every group to have volunteered and stayed in the Habitat loft had left a wall mural representing their school.

The Park View football players went through an orientation where they learned a little about the Habitat process and the people for whom the Habitat houses are built. Many players were surprised to learn that Habitat did not simply provide homes for free, but offered financial responsibility classes for homeowners and actually sold the homes at an extremely low price with a no-interest mortgage…

The second day saw the group work on a different project, the Youth United house. Youth United is a volunteer program that was intriguing to the Park View group. Ten high schools in the Winston-Salem area banded together to raise $55,000 to sponsor the building of a Habitat house. They also worked to provide volunteers to help build the home…

Many of the members of the Habitat trip will be returning to the Winston-Salem area this July when they plan to participate in the Wake Forest University Passing Camp. One of the houses the players worked on may be ready to be handed over to a family by July, and the home dedication ceremony could be when the Patriots are in town.

I really like a few things about this story.  First, it's a great way to get kids involved in Habitat projects.  Second, it's a great way for Habitat to get more hands on deck for their projects and get the word out to the next generation about their programs.  Third, it's a great way to introduce the Piedmont Triad to kids from other regions. Fourth, it's a great way for some high school kids to do good while also working on their own futures with visits to universities.  Finally, it can't hurt the local schools' recruiting that they had those kids visiting their campuses (not to mention Wake's football program).

Biggest surprise of the story to me?  The fact that Habitat houses visiting groups in the loft over the Re-Store.  I had no idea.

Souper Bowl Sunday

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Our church is hosting a Souper Bowl of Caring lunch tomorrow (Sunday, February 1) starting at noon.  All donations will go to Sunnyside Ministry and as you can imagine Sunnyside needs every bit of help it can get.  We donated a few dozen chocolate chip cookies, and our oldest son Michael went over this morning to help cook. The entire youth group will be helping serve tomorrow afternoon.

The main feature is, well, soup.  I got to taste-test the soup when I dropped off the cookies and I can tell you it is w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l.  So come on by, feed your face and support a good cause all at once.
  

Souper Bowl of Caring
8300 Concord Church Road
Lewisville, NC 27023

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What Should the Kids Do?

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Last night the youth leader at our church asked us, the parents, for some ideas for activities for the kids.  This was a good idea for a couple of reasons; first, I'm a firm believer that you get better ideas from muliple people than from one, and second when people offer their own ideas they're more likely to get involved themselves.  That said, we were all pretty fragged last night and it was tough getting the creative juices flowing so I thought I'd put out an RFP for ideas for our church's youth group.  Here are the basics about the group:

  • Small, but powerful.  There are about 15 kids in the group and they range in age from 6th graders to 12th graders.
  • The activities should have some kind of tie to what you'd expect a church youth group to be involved with, but it need not be overtly spiritual.  For instance one of the most powerful things they do every year is a week at mission camp in Laurel Ridge.  While there they spend their days doing projects in the local community that are geared to helping people: fixing a shut-in's deck, painting a fence at a local school that doesn't have the budget for it, building a wheel chair ramp at a local home, etc.  At night they do a lot of singing and church related activities, but the main purpose of the week is to teach them service to others.  You can see where I'm going with this. 
  • The group gets together almost every Sunday night for two hours during the school year.  Many of the activities will need to fit this time frame, but they do sometimes step out and do longer activities at different times. 
  • One activity already planned is the Souper Bowl of Caring on Feb. 1, but outside of that we're pretty open over the next couple of months. 

Please feel free to share any ideas you might have, or activities you've seen other groups engage in.   

Knowing Each Other

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Ed Cone offered a very thoughtful post on Christmas.  He begins with the controversy over Obama's selection of Rick Warren as one of the people to do the invocation at the inauguration and weaves it into his thoughts on the benefit of communicating with people of opposing viewpoints as happened between Warren and Melissa Etheridge. Ed ends with this:

There are many places on earth where no grievance is ever forgotten,
and people are invested in keeping conflicts going. If one is more
interested in seeking grievance than finding common ground, one can
always find reasons to perpetuate discord.

One good thing about
living in Greensboro is that it affords those who would seek it the
chance to know many different types of people. I count among my friends
many who hold very different views on any number of issues. That
doesn't make us agree, but it makes us more agreeable.

Obviously
knowing each other is no panacea. But it can be a start. Life outside
the silo is healthy. Good for Etheridge and Warren for seeking it, and
good for Obama for trying to broaden the common ground.

Peace. Merry Christmas.

Reclaiming Futures in Forsyth County (and Elsewhere)

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Reclaiming Futures is a project that tries to help young people in trouble with drugs, alcohol and crime.  They have a blog called Reclaiming Futures Every Day and it's there that I found a post about the site visit that Renate Reichs, the Network Coordinator for Cook County, Illinois made as part of her coaching of the Forsyth County and Crossroads (a collaboration of Iredell, Surry and Yadkin counties) networks.  From the post:

The strengths of both sites were readily apparent. Although
Forsyth County is more urban (think Winston-Salem), and Yadkin, Surry,
and Iredell (“R-dale”–?) are more rural (think Mr. Airy and Andy
Griffith), both sites have committed, experienced, and professional
fellows well versed in cooperative planning and collaboration. There is
also a zeal for the tasks involved in Reclaiming Futures that's very
energizing.
 
This is especially noticeable at the Crossroads site, as there are
three counties working together, meeting on a regular basis, and
assembling and smoothing disparate pieces to fit the Reclaiming Futures Model. Specifically, they have regularly-involved people who are not “Fellows”
to bring a wider pool of experience, commitment, and knowledge to the
table. For its part, Forsyth County has chosen to expand Reclaiming
Futures from its established drug treatment court, championed by its
Judicial and Justice Fellows, thus starting on a firm foundation.
 
All of that is good news. However, one of the challenges that both
sites face — and it is huge — is a lack of treatment resources.
There's great enthusiasm for implementing better screening and
assessment tools (everybody was off and running with their rapid cycle test for screening), but the “Then what?” question looms large:
  • What if the kids funneled through screening and assessment completely overwhelm treatment capacity?
  • How do we grow treatment—good treatment, administered by professionals?
  • Where do the dollars come from?
  • Is Reclaiming Futures capable of pushing treatment expansion, and exactly how does that happen? 

We'd love to hear from sites that have successfully answered these
questions or are grappling with the same problems. Forsyth, Crossroads
(is that “Ire-dale”?), and I await your wisdom.

This sounds like a worthy program and for the sake of our local at-risk youth I hope they are able to solve their treatment conundrum.

Yes! Weekly’s Barber Asks ‘Who cares about homeless and hungry?’

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Yes! Weekly's Keith Barber asks if it's wise for the city of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County to spend public funds on the new baseball stadium considering that our social services are stretched to the max.  From his piece:

The official unveiling of the Winston- Salem minor league baseball team’s new name at the Millennium Center on Dec. 4 seemed a world away from the harsh realities facing many of Forsyth County’s residents. The general gaiety of the event enjoyed by an estimated 700 people felt like a scene out of the Roaring ’20s, like the day before the stock market crash of 1929…

At the end of October, the NC Employment Security Commission reported Forsyth’s unemployment rate at 6.3 percent. The number of unemployed individuals in Forsyth has risen 35.4 percent since the same period in 2007. Since Jan. 1, 2008, nine Forsyth employers have reported layoffs and 30 area businesses have shuttered their doors, putting more than 1,000 people out of work. And those are just the ones that have been reported.

Despite the hard times in Forsyth, the show went on at last week’s ceremony to announce the new name of the team formerly known as the Warthogs. Baseball Downtown and Mandalay Baseball, the managing entity of the minor league franchise, spared no expense at the event called “Baseball New Year.” When the team’s multi-millionaire owner, Billy Prim, and Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines unveiled the team’s new name — the Dash — the crowd roared its approval. All of this left me to wonder: Why would the city and the county agree to loan a multimillionaire upwards of $24 million to build a downtown ballpark when those funds could be more wisely spent on the needs of the homeless, the jobless and the hungry in Forsyth County? The Winston-Salem City Council agreed to put up $12 million toward the construction of the downtown ballpark in November 2007. In March of last year, the Forsyth County Commissioners approved a resolution allowing Prim’s company, Sports Menagerie LLC, and Brookstown Development Partners to receive economic development incentives up to $12.5 million to be paid in annual installments over a 25-year period. At that time, the economic outlook in Forsyth wasn’t as bleak as it currently is, but the picture wasn’t rosy by any stretch. In fact, Joines and the city council are four years into a 10-year plan to fight chronic homelessness. Andrea Kurtz of the United Way of Forsyth County is tasked with implementing the plan. Kurtz said the recession has pushed the resources of Forsyth’s social service agencies to their breaking point.

I've never liked the idea of public funding for ball parks that benefit private companies or individuals and my thinking on the Winston-Salem ball park has focused mainly on my disagreement with the philosophy of the use of public funds in this way.  Until now I hadn't thought of the opportunity costs associated with the city's decision to fund the stadium, but when you do think about it they are substantial.  Yes the city is due to get its money back eventually, but as Barber points out in the mean time the money could have been used to bolster social services now that it's really needed but it's tied up in the stadium project.

Since we've come this far I truly hope that the project is a success and that we see a revitalized downtown come out of this, but as a community we need to have a serious discussion about how tax dollars are used for private enterprise.  What happens the next time an entrepreneur comes calling with an idea for a new theater, entertainment complex or indoor stadium that will be used as a cornerstone for some new revitalization effort in some other part of town?  Do we whip out the checkbook or do we say "Good luck" and then provide as much help as we can to make it a reality  by expediting permits, assigning someone to help them work through the red tape, etc.?  As you might guess my vote would be for the latter.

Choppin

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Our church, Unity Moravian in Lewisville, had it’s annual fall BBQ today and I volunteered to help chop the pigs. Specifically we chopped over 60 pork shoulders which came to about 900 pounds of pig.

A bunch of guys had to bug out early, but luckily I’d recruited Michael, our 16 year old and his buddy Daniel to help. They had great fun wielding the cleavers

The BBQ officially opened at 4:00 and we didn’t finish chopping until 3:30 so without the boys I don’t know if we’d have been done chopping in time.

There were also a bunch of chickens being cooked and several guys were manning that operation. The guys I don’t envy were the experts who stayed up all night with the pigs. They also stuck around to make sure our part of the op went successfully.

Usually there’s plenty of food left to buy after the event is over so if you’re in the mood for good BBQ just give me a shout and I’ll hook you up.

Call for Help Feeding the Homeless

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The organization in Greensboro that is the sole downtown provider of meals for the homeless on certain mornings of the week and Friday evenings will not be able to serve the remainder of August so Cara Michele of ChosenFast is trying to pick up the slack.  She’s looking for donations of food or money and you can read all about it here.  They are concentrating on breakfast for Thursday and Friday, and dinner on Friday.  You can contact her here.

Thanks to Ed for the pointer.