ONE Staffers Get Their Hands Dirty
Last Friday, a group of ONE employees traded in their business casual clothes for real work clothes, volunteering our personal time to work with D.C. Habitat for Humanity in honor of World Habitat Day. We arrived bright and early at the construction site, not knowing what to expect. The Site Superintendent explained that D.C. Habitat for Humanity had purchased the land from the D.C. Government for $1 and was building a 53 home development for low-income families. Our focus was working on the six homes that are currently under construction. I thought we’d spend the day hammering but it turns out, there were many projects to work on. While my co-workers spent the day sanding, caulking and painting, I spent the day preparing the yards– removing rocks, breaking up the hard soil, shoveling topsoil, laying down sod –a lot more work than this apartment dweller is used to! To be honest, I was happy to be outside because it was such a beautiful day!
We were all impressed by the dedication of the Habitat for Humanity staff who led our groups. Most of them are AmeriCorps volunteers who work on these houses five days a week all year long despite heat, rain, cold, and snow! My group leader was actually on her second year of service to Habitat for Humanity.
At lunch time, Susan Corts Hill, the Director of Public Policy for Habitat for Humanity International, came out to tell us about their efforts to help families attain safe and affordable housing around the world. Globally, there are 1.6 billion people who suffer from some kind of shelter deprivation. It’s amazing that in some places, it may cost as little as $800 to build a house (the average cost to build a Habitat home in the United States is $60,000). She told us about their Global Village trips, which are a great opportunity for anyone interested in doing good, productive work while learning more about another culture. If you can’t get abroad, Habitat for Humanity has more than 1000 affiliates across the United States, so there are plenty of places to volunteer! Susan also explained to us that World Habitat Day is an annual event (the first Monday in October) that was created by the United Nations to unite people of goodwill and organizations around the cause of housing to remind the world of its collective responsibility for the future of the human habitat.
Click here to learn more about World Habitat Day.
To learn more about volunteer opportunities with Habitat for Humanity (I highly recommend it!), click here.
-Ranna Lanagan, ONE Campaign
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October 9, 2008 at 1:52 am
Dear John-n-Barack:
Please establish a Twelve-Step plan to overcome global poverty.
Here are three possible steps to take:
A: Establish a cabinet-level Department of Wealth (or Financial Improvement (or Anti-Poverty (or some such synonym))) that will actively work to find effective, efficient, and expedient ways to eliminate poverty in America and around the world.
B: Establish a George Washington Carver Institute of Enrichment that will utilize the incredible famine fighting capabilities of the nutritionally enriched nutbutter-based nutella-esque food known as Plumpynut, combined with the incredible research capabilities of the CDC, the incredible food production capabilities of Americus, and the incredible distribution capabilities of New Orleans in order to form a worldwide headquarters for plumpynut distribution and famine fighting.
C: Utilize training personnel from the GWC Institute of Enrichment to establish a distributed network of production-n-distribution facility nodes worldwide, focused primarily in poverty-stricken and famine-laden countries, in order to reduce transportation costs and localize production and distribution capabilities, thus fighting in parallel the three-headed dog of poverty, famine, and climatastrophy.