And it takes a special blend of selflessness and purpose to volunteer to help raise that house.  This week if you visit the construction site, you’ll find a teenager helping to blow in insulation as part of his high school community service hours.  A future homeowner is crawling under the house putting up the under floor insulation as her sweat equity hours (‘sweat’ being the operative word!).  A few of our regular volunteers are doing overtime, laying flooring.  Restorative Justice kids and their mentors are working side by side installing cabinets.  When you stopped by the Restore this week you probably saw a volunteer verifying each item in the store is priced.  More than likely a volunteer cashier rang up your order or was in receiving helping to process your donation.  We never turn away volunteers who want to work in a customer service aspect to help shoppers find what they need (hint, hint.)

 

What you didn’t see are the volunteers who help in deconstruction.  Those volunteers carefully remove salvageable items, such as; cabinets, doors, windows, from buildings that are being renovated or torn down.  Those are the volunteers that get to use fun tools like reciprocating saws, chisels or pry bars!  You also wouldn’t have seen the volunteers who help staff booths at events or who are on monthly committees or who help in our office.

 

When not volunteering for us, our volunteers might be the traffic cop that pulled you over for rolling through the stop sign (shame on you), the teacher who is making the best use of summer vacation or the barista at your coffee shack haunt.  They might be the retiree who also volunteers for soup kitchen, your private practice doctor who barely has time to make a pot of coffee but manages to give us eight hours a month.  Or our volunteer might be the person standing behind you in the unemployment line. They may be volunteering because they know someone who lives in a Habitat house, or they may want to learn a new skill to apply to their own home renovation, or because they understand how hard it is to qualify for a traditional mortgage and truly believe each person should have a chance at affordable, decent housing. We’ve even had a gentleman volunteer on our women build on the off chance he’ll meet Miss Right.  Whatever the motivation, it takes each and every one of those volunteer hours in each and every aspect of our business to build a single house.  And we have built 80!

 

It takes a village to raise a roof, install windows, hang drywall, and landscape, process a donation of carpet, arrange the home store or send invitations to the next home dedication.  The staff and board of Bend Area Habitat for Humanity can’t thank our village of volunteers enough for everything they do for us and for the families. And we want to encourage anyone who hasn't given us a try, to visit our Volunteer page and sign up.

 

And if that one volunteer does meet Miss Right while volunteering for us, we’d be willing to host the ceremony if you'd be willing to overlook the mess!