What is a Home?
Background
Throughout 10th and 11th grade, we have been discussing the idea of a home. In 10th grade, the idea of "home" and what it means to have a home and a house was addressed in the English curriculum, in which we read several books focusing on these ideas including This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun. In This Boy's Life, Toby and his mother drive by fancy houses and dream of having them themselves, in The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby appears to have everything because of his extravagant house, however, he is missing the one thing he really wants, Daisy, and no matter how big his house is, he will not be happy without her. A Raisin in the Sun addresses home in conjunction with race and what impact a person's race has on their housing options. In unison with our studies, we volunteered at Grace at the Greenlight, a non-profit organization that not only serves breakfast daily to those experiencing homelessness in the New Orleans Area but also creates networks to reconnect people with their families and services that can help them get back on their feet after being on the streets.
Introduction
Service Learning is an important part of the curriculum at McGehee. Service Learning is more than just community service: it is a hands-on educational approach that combines work in the classroom with relevant community service projects. Service Learning gets students involved in their community and helps them learn about problems in their community that they otherwise may not know about. Sophomore year, our Service Learning project was volunteering at Grace at the Greenlight to serve breakfast to those experiencing homelessness. Junior year, our service learning project was volunteering with New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity and working on new construction, as well as performing repairs on preexisting homes through NOAHH's A Brush With Kindness Program.
Volunteering at Grace at The Greenlight
Junior year, we began the school year by reading Matthew Desmond's Evicted. This book opened my eyes to the struggles that people face when trying to get safe, affordable housing, whether those setbacks be race, gender, domestic violence, previous evictions, addiction, or children and family. Housing is affordable when occupants are paying no more than 30% of their income towards housing costs. Not having an affordable place to live can have more negative repercussions other than homelessness that are often not taken into consideration in the affordable housing conversation. These consequences include increased crime and when people are forced to spend more than a third of their income on housing, they have less money to spend on healthy foods, education, and recreation. NOAHH provides affordable housing to families in need of housing and willing to contribute to the construction process. More than half of New Orleans inhabitants do not have affordable housing so programs like NOAHH help more people get affordable housing. City, state, and federal government should provide more channels for people to access affordable housing, however, I believe that those who will be benefiting from these programs should also be contributing to the efforts.
An assignment from the beginning of the What is a Home unit
Final Product
The work we did for Habitat For Humanity this year will be life changing to those who will live in the new home we built and the home we painted, although our jobs on these sites may seem small, these simple contributions will live on in someone's forever home. Below are pictures taken at each of the Habitat for Humanity Service days, which prove that something as simple as a fresh coat of paint can completely transform a house.
BEFORE
Reflection
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Working with Habitat for Humanity and A Brush With Kindness had come to show me that not everyone has a safe, affordable, and comfortable place to call home, in fact, more than half of people living in New Orleans do not have an affordable place to live. A home provides a foundation for one's life and when one does not have a home, it is difficult for them to do much else in their life and become successful. This organization taught me that when people have a nice home to live in, it positively impacts all other aspects of their life.
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Before working with Habitat for Humanity, I thought that NOAHH just build houses and gave them to families who needed them, I did not know that there were so many requirements to be able to get a house from Habitat for Humanity, such as having a job, paying the mortgage, and contributing 350 hours to building the house or volunteering at the Restore Center. I think this is a great way to provide people with affordable housing because it encourages them to work for it and it also gives them the sense of satisfaction that they are able to build themselves a house and pay for it. In terms of whether I think housing is a right, I believe that people should have access to programs such as NOAHH that provide affordable housing in return of contributions such as volunteering because it strengthens the community and encourages people to work for something that is important to them.
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Although I single handedly cannot solve the affordable housing problem in New Orleans, small efforts, such as volunteering with Habitat for Humanity can help. After this experience, I may be interested in do more volunteering with NOAHH or a Brush With Kindness to work on more houses because it was a very rewarding experience that I also thought was fun. I would especially be motivated to do more volunteering after learning about how many people are in need of affordable housing and how many neighborhoods were decimated by Hurricane Katrina and are still in need of help rebuilding, nearly 13 years later.
