Inseparable Nomads

Habitat for Humanity

On Tuesday I had the chance to volunteer at my first Habitat for Humanity construction site shift!  I have volunteered before, but only in the office stuffing envelopes, so I was really excited to get on a site and get some work done on a house.

Back in college, my friend, Quinnen, introduced me to Habitat for Humanity because she was very involved while in college in Ithaca.  I had never heard of it before and it intrigued me right from the start.  She had a lot of great experiences and made a bunch of friends while learning how to build houses and help lower income families afford their own homes.  She even spent a summer after school doing the Bike to Build program with Habitat where she biked across the country with a group of people, making various stops along the way to help build in different communities across America!  How cool is that?

I never managed to get my act together while I was in Ithaca, but I always knew I wanted to get involved when I could find a good time to start volunteering.  As soon as I got to Boston I knew I would have the time and would appreciate the opportunity to meet people in the area while learning some valuable building skills.  I’m developing this serious interest in learning to build and construct houses and I definitely feel the need to offer my time as a volunteer and do something to help other people.

I arrived at the site out in Needham for the morning shift and got to work right away.  The house is nearing completion, so I mostly did a lot of site clean up, but I got to do some really neat stuff too.  I learned how to use a circular saw, yey power tools!  It definitely made me a bit nervous because I haven’t used any serious power tools since I took shop class back in Junior High School.  I also helped lay some concrete.  I ended my shift helping paint the enclosed porch’s interior roof, which I really enjoyed because I like to paint.

The Needham house should be all ready to hand the keys over to the new owners at the end of the month!  I’m really excited for them and proud to think that I helped (albeit only a few hours) to make it possible!

It’s a bit challenging to get Individual Volunteer shifts, but I hope to get out there again soon!  If you’re reading this and have ever wanted to volunteer in general or for Habitat, I highly recommend it.  So far everyone I’ve met is really nice, very thankful and interesting to talk to.  Habitat doesn’t expect you to have any prior building or construction experience and will teach you to do anything they need you to do (that you’re comfortable doing, you won’t have to use power tools or do anything that you feel uncomfortable doing).

There is also Group Volunteer shifts, in fact there is way more opportunity to volunteer as a group since the group needs to donate a certain amount to Habitat which means they have more resources both physically and financially to complete their projects.  If you have a group of friends who are interested, or if your workplace is interested in volunteering time you should check it out!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 9:04 am and is filed under Boston, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.