At last year’s conference in Virginia, Millard Fuller asked FCNWLA board members Becky Cooksey and Katie Weir to host the 2010 meeting.

Beginning at 1 p.m. Friday, the various sessions will be held at First United Methodist Church. The Saturday afternoon sessions end with a tour of Allendale, which the Fuller Center calls its “flagship” building site.

Dinner will follow with Linda Fuller, cofounder of the Fuller Center for Housing, speaking. Attendance at a Sunday worship service is optional.

Local home owner Phyllis Davis has been selected to speak at Friday’s dinner.

Lee Jeter, FCNWLA executive director, said he is proud to host the event and “to showcase what we’ve built, all our partners and our city.”

The conference will cover over 13 topics. Weir said that the essential idea she formed at last year’s meeting is the “importance of partnering with entities in the community.” Several of the conference’s sessions address this concern.

Weir also is interested in the session labeled, “ReUse Store Strategies.” She said this is about creating an income source from the reselling of donated items. “For example,” Weir said, “many stores will donate items that they can’t sell because of imperfections.”

Groups that receive these items may not be able to use them in their building projects but can resell them for operating revenue.

2009 Conference

Participants in the conference will be staying at the Downtown Holiday Inn on Lake Street and will be transported to the church and other venues.

Weir said that they will need about 15 local volunteers to help with the conference in areas such as meals, registration and transportation. She hopes that many FCNWLA board members will be able to participate.

Register At FullerCenter.org – Put on your Google Calendar

“The floors are cracked,” said Brazile. “We have holes in the walls. The doors aren’t even with the thing so a lot of wind comes through and we don’t have any source of heat except the stove and a couple electric heaters.”

Just last week an anonymous good Samaritan learned about Brazile’s situation and called Shreveport police hoping to help.

“Most people call to put people down but they were concerned enough to try to get some help and not try to hurt me,” said Brazile. “I’m overwhelmed.”

Shreveport Police Department Corporal Mike Dunn and Sandra Lister went to work.

“When I called businesses some of them I didn’t tell what I wanted I just told them I had a family I wanted them to meet and when they came out they felt compelled to do it for me,” said Lister.

Within days help poured in. Wilbert Williams with Mt. Mariah Baptist Church will donate $500.00. Calvin and Delores Johnson’s Motorcycle Club will donate a sink and a monetary gift. Richard Rascoe with the Whitlock Plumbing Company will complete all of Brazile’s plumbing work for free.

“If you come to our church and say you need help we will open our doors and our hearts because that’s what Jesus did,” said Williams.

“Some have and some have not,” said Johnson. “It’s always been a close thing to our hearts to help put back into the community.”

“I want to get everything going for her and take care of those little ones and be able to clean up,” said Rascoe.

The outpouring of love is a Christmas miracle Brazile never thought she would receive.

“If I thanked them all day and all night and all month and all year it really wouldn’t be enough,” said Brazile.

C.J. Enterprises has donated $1000.00 to the Brazile family and challenges other businesses to do the same.

The future is looking even brighter for Brazile and her children. Shreveport’s Fuller Center for Housing is currently helping Brazile apply for a brand new home through its program.

© Amber Miller /KTAL

Not far from Alston Street, volunteers slipped on their gardening gloves and got a little dirty to clean up the Asian Gardens at Milam and Common streets. The Aseana Foundation, which manages the downtown garden, put on the event in partnership with Make a Difference Day.

“I just thank everyone who thought enough of me to come out here and work,” Sullivan said. “I’ve been blessed with a house before. The house before was from my parents, but this one is mine — it’s a lot different,” she said with big smile.

Make A Difference Day 2009

Walker said she never dreamed she’d be a homeowner at age 22. The house was originally built to be handicap accessible, but during the build process Walker’s grandmother, who applied for the house and convinced Walker to be a co-applicant, passed away.

“I say she knew that she was going to pass away. That’s why she wanted me to be the co-applicant,” Walker said, calling the house a blessing for her and her 5-year-old son, Rodrigues Walker.

Walker grew up in Allendale and her approaching move-in date is bringing her full circle. From birth to age 12, Walker lived in a small house on the very lot where her new three-bedroom, two-bathroom house stands in the 1400 block of Alston Street. She said she was shocked when she learned months ago the location of her future house.

Just outside her kitchen door is a sidewalk adjoining her house to the house of soon-to-be-neighbor Sullivan, 67, the woman’s granddaughter and two grandchildren.

In 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approached, Sullivan and her family vowed to leave together and stay together or not leave at all. “There were 21 of us, and we left in my granddaughter’s Hyundai Elantra.”

Walker’s and Sullivan’s houses are the 39th and 40th houses completed by the Fuller Housing Center.

“When we undertook our 40th home — 40 is typically a number of trials and tribulations — we knew we would have some trials and tribulations,” said Lee Jeter, the center’s executive director.

Construction began Aug. 31 and as deadline — Make a Difference Day — approached, the rains came.

The constant rain over the past two weeks “has proven this house is built on the rock,” Jake Owensby, dean of St. Mark’s Cathedral, said alluding to Matthew 7:25, which reads “The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.”

Receiving the keys to their homes is not the last step, but the first step, in the women’s path to home ownership, according to Katie Weir, co-chair of the center’s board.

Sullivan and Walker will each close on their house later this week and enter a 20-year, no-interest mortgage. Their mortgage payments, set between $350 and $400, pay for the cost of the building materials.

The formerly adjudicated property the houses are built on is donated as well as all labor and some materials. And the city’s role in donating the land is one Mayor Cedric Glover said “represents the greatest of win-win scenarios the city likes to be involved in.”

The city is able to move out of the red when these property are no longer their responsibility to maintain. “We’re returning stakeholders to this community,” Glover said.

© Kelsey McKinney/Shreveport-Times

The Act of Donation ceremony took place at the Clay Street office of the center with refreshments following.

Chesapeake spokesman Kevin McCotter made the presentation.

Jeter said that having the truck will reduce “wear and tear” on the personal vehicles of the center’s staff.

He also noted that the truck will allow the center to accept more donations. Additionally, staff will be able to bring materials to work sites from storage bins without making multiple trips.

The FCNWLA wants to acquire two trailers, one closed and one open, Jeter said. The Silverado will enable employees to pull heavy trailer loads.

Pangborn’s chapel was full of interested listeners, the walls and stairs lined with those the seats couldn’t accommodate. The group welcomed Fuller with long and resounding applause.

With his Southern accent and humor, Fuller opened the speech by asking those in the back to try to move forward or else, he said, he “might think you’re Baptist.”

He also apologized for his manner of dress.

“You must excuse me for being terribly overdressed,” Fuller said, indicating the suit he had on.

Fuller greeted the audience, saying he was honored to be on Notre Dame’s campus for the weekend. He said he met with alumni Friday who were sponsoring a house in Shreveport, La. through his newest organization, the Fuller Center for Housing. He also broke ground for the 99th and 100th houses built through the South Bend chapter of Habitat for Humanity – 12 of which were built exclusively by Notre Dame students.

“Out of the 800 college chapters of Habitat for Humanity, Notre Dame stands way high on the list,” Fuller said. “I don’t know of another campus chapter that has built more than 12 houses.”

He said while he was at the groundbreaking, he related the story of 25 Matthew, which teaches service to the needy, for “inasmuch as you do it to one of the least, you do it to me.”

“Well, the father of the family receiving the 100th house just happened to be named Jesus, and his son was Jesus, junior. So that was pretty appropriate, being able to provide Jesus with a home,” Fuller joked.

He went on to applaud those who were participating in Shack City and sleeping outside in boxes, especially in the rain.

“It’s wonderful that you’re willing to get in a box and bear some discomfort to raise awareness,” he said. “In years past, one of the greatest problems Habitat had was making people aware of the problem, and what we were doing to help fix it.”

In his organization’s seventh year, Fuller decided to walk from Americus, Ga. to Indianapolis – a journey of 700 miles – to help raise awareness, he said.

“Needless to say, my wife was very skeptical,” he said.

He related the story of what happened when the group of walkers made it to Dunlap, Tenn., where the pastor they asked for shelter was reluctant to let them sleep in his church’s basement, because Habitat for Humanity “sounds like some kind of cult,” Fuller said.

The pastor let them sleep in his backyard and use the hose to clean themselves off – “It’s amazing, but you really can shower with your clothes on,” Fuller joked – and the next day invited them to service at his church. At the end of the service, while everyone was waiting to sing the closing hymn, the pastor turned to Fuller and said if he wanted to address the congregation, now was the time.

“The pastor said, ‘You got five minutes,’ but all I had was my standard 30 minute speech,” Fuller said. “But I stood up there, everyone standing with their hymnbooks in their hands waiting to get out of there, and gave my 30 minute speech in five minutes and walked out of Dunlap.”

Fuller said five or six years went by before he got a call from a man named Charles Henry in Dunlap, who had heard Fuller speak that day. Henry said he couldn’t forget what Fuller had said, and wanted to donate all the money he was making in a job he took on post-retirement to Habitat for Humanity. Fuller said Henry wanted to hear all the places Habitat was working, and stopped him when he spoke of their newest sites in Guatemala.

“He said, ‘Guatemala! I like the sound of that. Use my money in Guatemala,’” Fuller said.

Henry has been sending the organization checks since that day.

“I tell you this story because you never know when you do something what impact it will have. You don’t know, when you sleep out tonight, who you’ll impact,” Fuller said. “What you’re doing will certainly have an impact on you – it’ll be so uncomfortable, you won’t forget it.”

He told the audience that even though they could not fully understand the plight of the homeless, they could be witnesses.

He related a letter he received from a woman in rural West Virginia, who said she wanted to help Habitat for Humanity but had no money to do so. She had no legs, was losing her fingers, had a disabled husband and a brother with cerebral palsy and lived in a house with no running water.

“That’s her reality,” Fuller said. “And this is not in a Third World country – this is in America, one of the richest nations in the world.”

Fuller said he wanted to continue to expand his work and take it new places, as the problem of poverty was widespread and growing. He explained that even by building 30,000 homes per year, it would take 7,500 years to meet the current needs of the homeless in the world.

“So we need to up the ante, we need to sleep out more, we need to speak up now,” he said. “Everyone in this room lived in a nice home, but so many of our fellow humans don’t have that chance. It’s clear in the Bible – we are our brothers’ and our sisters’ keepers.”

Fuller then bid farewell to the group, reiterating his praise for Notre Dame’s involvement in Habitat for Humanity and issuing audience members a challenge.

“You are wonderful representatives of your University and my organization,” Fuller said. “But remember – to whom much is given, much is required.”

Source: http://www.ndsmcobserver.com/2.2754/habitat-founder-addresses-crowd-1.265088