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Mandi Mooney
Online Managing Editor
September 2, 2005
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Danielle Bush, Christi Bothwell, Kaci Campbell and a young volunteer give up their Saturday to serve others through the Holston Habitat for Humanity. |
-Photo by Brian Rossen |
Instead of spending their first Saturday morning at Milligan sleeping in, relaxing and enjoying brunch in the cafeteria, over 40 Milligan students and faculty joined forces with the Holston Habitat for Humanity at its first multi-home build in Elizabethton last weekend.
“This is the first (multi-build) for the whole Holston chapter, which is the
Tri-Cities area,” said senior Andy McNeely, president of Milligan’s campus
chapter of Habitat. “This is huge. This is awesome.”
Volunteer workers from different organizations and churches as well as the
Holston chapter are currently building three houses near South Hills Estates for
families in need of decent shelter.
“It is based on a first come, first serve and need,” said McNeely. “Families
have to have a certain number of man hours - we call them ‘sweat equity hours’ -
before we even break ground on their house. They always say that Habitat is not
a hand out, it’s a hand up.”
Mark Matson, vice president for academic affairs and dean, and McNeely serve on
the Holston chapter board of directors. For the past two years Matson has been
the chairman of a task force planning the multi-build.
“We’ve been meeting monthly for about a year and a half now,” said Matson.
“We’ve been building committees to do the work, to get the timetable in place,
to get a group of people volunteering, raising some money….and just trying to
get this whole thing together.”
Volunteers will be working on the homes for the next few weeks. Milligan volunteers are slated to work the next two Saturdays.
“You saw lots of people interacting with the families,” said McNeely. “There
were a lot of (students) really impressed, really amazed at what they had done
at the end of the day.”
Habitat is an international, non-profit organization which has provided more
than 175,000 homes to almost one million people since 1976.
“Habitat always has an extended list of people who have been qualified,” said
McNeely.
“I’m just convinced that this is a really good ministry,” said Matson. “At some
point, you’ve got to make the Gospel just real to people, and you do that
sometimes by providing them housing and helping them gain dignity, become
productive individuals.”
Since Milligan’s chapter began in the fall of 2002 and then became an official
chartered chapter in 2003, it has been mainly involved with community service
work.
“We helped out at Appalachian Christian Camp, and we did a whole bunch of
different stuff there,” said McNeely. “We did brush clearing, we helped make the
trails better, we went in and cleaned cabinets, we painted, we did roofing and
all sorts of odds and ends.”
McNeely said that the goal of Milligan’s chapter of Habitat is to strike
students’ interest in the community as well as in Habitat.
“I think at college there are so many people who go to college and all they know
is the college,” said McNeely. “They don’t know the people outside. So this
gives everyone an opportunity to serve the community. That’s the biggest thing -
serving others.”