Suggestions for a Local Short-Term Home Repair Mission Trip

So how do you start looking for your short-term mission trip opportunity? Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Contact your local or county senior services agency volunteers coordinator to see what they know needs volunteers.

• Contact Dept. of Family and Children’s Services (or whatever it is called near you) to see whether they know of a low-income family fostering children and in need of home repair help. This is especially needed where there are teens being fostered.

• Contact agencies that help people with disabilities to see if they can direct you to a need.

• Are there single mothers in your church network (members and their extended families and neighbors) whose homes need attention but cannot pay for maintenance?

• Has there been a localized disaster, e.g. a flood or tornado that swept through a neighborhood (though it may not officially be a declared emergency, see how those in the path feel about it)? Contact your county or state Emergency Management Agency to see whom to contact about helping.

• Inner-city/low-income neighborhood church leaders often know of someone in their congregation who needs help. Use the opportunity to serve alongside other Christ-followers.

• Make sure that you have a waiver to cover accidents and your team. Also, make sure that your team members are insured!

So How Do I Start a Home Repairs Team?

Now that you’ve got a project, how do you start a team and what do you need? We’ve created a website – www.homerepairs.org – where we have collected the resources that can help you start up your own home repairs ministry at your church. You’ll find articles and forms that will take you through all phases of starting and running a ministry, a blog with posts from the front-lines of the ministry, a forum to ask and answer your tough questions (coming soon) and a list of churches by area to help you partner with other like-minded Christians. Sign up today and get your short term mission or youth trip ready for the summer!

Who we serve in our home repairs ministry is a big decision with a lot of potential implications, some good and some not so good. There is no hard and fast rule on how to choose, but you can use several methods to help guide you. Ideally, these should be discussed as you are starting a ministry. These methods are not all limited to a home repairs ministry, so you can see if they are appropriate for your mercy ministry.

A. Method 1 - Having Clearly Defined Criteria

A list of rules can be used as a template to identify the threshold of “the truly needy.” Some of these that are fairly common but when compiled form a rather rigid framework, which may be a positive or a negative depending on how you view it. For instance:

• Must be 60 years old or over

• Owner/occupant of the home in question

• Income level below _________/per resident

• No able bodied family in the area to help out, or family must participate . . .

• No available non-essential assets that are available for liquidation to at least purchase materials, if not hire contractors.

• The help request is necessary for the maintenance or safety of the house

• The owner is not a member of a church with a home repairs team

• A situation where volunteers will feel that their time is not being used well

B. Method 2 - Using Your Gut
Under this heading, the list in “Clearly Defined Criteria”, along with others that you might create, are applied generally, but can be overridden by certain members of the team, a staff member, or a leader who has the authority to do so, acknowledging the leading of the Lord in the situation and extenuating circumstances.

Come back Wednesday 5/23 for the last, and trickiest, method for choosing who you will serve.

Harvey

There are lots of avenues leading to service for handy tool people. Here are a few:

• People recently disabled need their homes retrofitted for wheel chairs – widened doorways, ramps, removal of barriers, trip hazards, etc. People who are sick, elderly or otherwise unable to make needed changes.
• Is there a widow in your neighborhood whose yard has gotten away from her? Major yard cleanups are great to get the young people out with the adults.
• We generally say “for homeowners” but this is not an absolute. Repairing properties for landlords has proven to be a bad practice, but how about damage to a rental home by foster children that the foster parent is responsible to cover? How about foster parents in general, especially those taking in teens!
• Single mothers struggling to make ends meet often cannot hire a handyman to make repairs, but we happen to know someone . . . How about those heroic people coming back from the middle east with war injuries?
• The food pantry ministry may need some new permanent shelving but gave the cash reserves to hungry families fighting unemployment. How about your buddies with tool skills? Nearly anyone can build shelves.
• Always popular are grab bars in bathrooms. Know how to mount them? Watch the HRM Forum for answers.
• Don’t forget to pray with the people you help or even those with projects outside of your abilities. Follow up to show that you care as Christ cared (s) for you.
• James 1:27 & 28 points us to a properly lived faith life – helping those that cannot help themselves – start with widows and orphans and go from there.

Coming soon – how do we fund material purchases?