Wednesday, August 09, 2006

New Team

We have a new team of AmeriCorps NCCC here to work with us. Today, Silver 4 from Charleston, SC arrived to work with us through the middle of September. I feel bad for them not only because of the heat & humidity but we won't start building new houses until September, and the work they have ahead of them is site preparation and cleanup, and eventually some prebuild. We are their first service project of the year, so we need to set the bar high.

Our next round of houses will start construction on September 9. This happens to be the date I left last year to go work on a Habitat Global Village build, and subsequently changed my life's direction. Enough about me. To get to 50-ish houses, we need to build 30 more this year. As I previously stated, September 9 and then the 16th are our next two start dates and we have already started preparing the foundations for those houses. This team will at least see the walls raised on the September 9th house before they move on.

We're going to try to get them a bit more integrated into our affiliate than we have with previous teams - today I gave them an orientation from the construction perspective, a bit of history of the affiliate and how we're attempting to do things post-Katrina/Rita. Kim, an AmeriCorps who has joined us in the past few weeks, gave them an overview of the family selection process and Lynn, our development director, brought them up to speed on our sponsors and volunteer needs.

We hope to have them attend some of the home-buyer classes to give them a better understanding of the processes involved in partnering with families. Hopefully, they will have a better perspective of the affiliate operations before they leave us.

Welcome aboard.

7 comments:

JamesF said...

I see someone put up a profile picture.

So who is going to be the taskmaster for the new group?

mattfite said...

someone had their photo taken at a reunion, and said 'what the heck'.

why, thank you for asking. christiaan (aka kristen) will be their boss. it even made me sad that i won't be leading this group, but they're in good hands.

mattfite said...

trust me, if i had all my hair - i would grow it. then i would look the same, uh, except older.

i wish i could make it back for the dumplin's. i'll make do with cap'n crunch. if i get motivated, i may even make pb&j...

mattfite said...

well, color me surprised. all of those great minds in the same place? i think that violates a national security directive. and ross too??? how great! i would have loved to be there.

'middle name last initial @ personal pronoun.com'? yeah, i remember you. if not mine is you know, mattfite. and then [gmail|yahoo|hotmail|netscape].com. i really only check the first two anymore.

it's just like you to say something really nice. thank you.

mattfite said...

another blast from the past. my AmeriCorps stint ends on or about the 27th of August. as surprising as it may seem, i'm still not sure what i'm doing on the august 28th. but, it would be nice to come visit NOVA. I'll see what I can do.

mattfite said...

no worries, i have no plans to 'shut the blog down' in the foreseeable future. if i took a job working for the man, i would rethink that. who would want to read the exploits of a single-guy with a real job?

Mark Lundquist said...

Hey, that's hitting too close to home. I think some people will want to read the exploits of a single guy with a real job...I hope.