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WNY Americorps helps make over a neighborhood

COMMUNITY

"If you don’t know about Americorps after Extreme Makeover, you’ll never know,” laughs Joshua Randle, chief operating officer for Western New York Americorps, one of the largest local programs in the country. For a few weeks this past November, when Extreme Makeover: Home Edition descended on Massachusetts Street, Randle had a different title—director of volunteer operations—and was responsible for a community revitalization and transformation project the magnitude of which has never been seen in Buffalo.

“People don’t understand about Americorps,” Randle says. “We function as an intermediary for nonprofits like PUSH [People United for Sustainable Housing], but we also have members out there every day doing direct service. It’s like a civilian or domestic Peace Corps; members are voluntary participants who get a small stipend to live and serve for a year. They come from all over the country, and they do community work in big and small ways every day, but this was an opportunity for them to lead volunteers. That’s one of our missions—to generate and mobilize volunteers in large ways.”

And mobilize they did. After Randle was recruited to spearhead the project by David Stapleton, president of David Homes, the lead builder, he began to see the potential. “I came back and talked to our CEO, and said ‘Let’s make this a community project, the biggest Extreme Makeover: Home Edition ever.’” To make it happen, WNY Americorps’ staff of thirty and a third of its full-time members—about 200—took on leading roles in tackling community projects and coordinating volunteers. When Randle’s brother Trey, an Americorps alum, asked how he could help, Randle told him he needed someone to run “the largest food drive this community’s ever seen.” (The drive collected a record 85.1 tons of food. “A lot of that went to the City Mission,” Randle says. “The Mission closed its doors three times last year because of lack of food. That won’t happen this year.”) And so it went until more than 5,000 volunteers took on the challenge, ensuring that the Powells got far more than a new house: They got a new neighborhood.

More than fifty properties in the immediate vicinity were given new roofs, siding, painting, landscaping, windows, weatherization, or other improvements to make the homes more livable and energy efficient. New sidewalks were poured on both sides of Massachusetts between Normal and Plymouth. More than a hundred security lights were installed and 119 trees planted. And a community garden the size of two city lots was designed and installed at Normal and Massachusetts. “Because the theme was green building, the home was taken down by hand, and a lot of those materials were reused,” Randle says. “The foundation of the house is in the community garden, which is a truly remarkable accomplishment. Individuals from St. Mary’s School for the Deaf built the gazebo, and there’s security lighting around it. It’ll be maintained by local block clubs and nonprofits.”

It’s projects like these that excite Randle, who believes the value in these endeavors is creating sustainable impact. “If the show came to the second poorest city in the nation and dropped a $400,000 home into it, how are you going to sustain that?” he asks. “I committed to the only way we will do it, because it was our hope to design a sustainable future for their community. Our model is to take a little resource, leverage additional resources from private, public, and social sectors and have homeowners invest themselves through sweat equity or resources of their own. We don’t parachute in and say, ‘Here’s your new roof.’ We want them to own it. We want to plant the seed of inheritance for future generations to harvest, and now that’s taken root. One man who got a new roof wanted to patch the foundation for someone who lives across the street. They get bitten by the service bug, and it’s a way for them not only to earn it, but own it, and pay it forward.”

The residents were thrilled when they realized the scope of the community effort, and the teams from EMHE were “amazed, inspired, awestruck,” Randle says. “After 164 episodes, they hadn’t seen anything on this scale, and they were really inspired by the power of the movement of service in our region. That’s what I was told time and time again. Something truly special and remarkable happened on Massachusetts Avenue, and it’s something that should be replicated across Western New York. How, we don’t know yet. But we certainly know the direction to go.”

Donna Hoke Kahwaty is the editor of Buffalo Spree Home.