The executive director of FCNWLA says he “learned a lot” during the Legacy Build and is ready to build two or three houses in March. To build three he needs $210,000.

He is also beginning to lay the foundation for building in other areas of town. He said, “There are people who need homes; there is property available.”

Jeter also wants organizations in those communities to step up and help through donations and volunteering.

In addition to building new houses, Jeter wants to expand the Greater Blessing repair and renovation program.

The program helps people who are homeowners get the repairs they may need but cannot afford.

A new endeavor in coming months will be involvement in lead abatement in houses built before 1978, especially those houses with minor children. Jeter said he had previously obtained a pamphlet
on lead poisoning so workers could be safe while doing rehab work. “I didn’t know it would become a focus area,” he said.

In the meantime, the Louisiana Department of Health and Human Services asked the center to get involved in solving the problem of lead poisoning. “First, I’m getting educated about lead poisoning,”
Jeter said. “Then I’ll pursue grant opportunities to address this issue.”

Jeter told of a client who may lose custody of a 4- year-old grandchild if they can’t address the problem. The client is disabled and on fixed income; moving is out of the question. “We need to step in and help them,” he said.

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

A partnership was formed that is now helping residents in other cities as well. The Fuller Center builds houses; CRI builds community. Together, we are “Building on Higher Ground” to help those who lack the resources and the relationships that could make home ownership possible on their own.

The vision goes beyond building houses for a few. We are building hope for many. Shreveport’s Allendale neighborhood – an area of decaying houses, high crime and little income – was chosen for the launch of the “Higher Ground” initiative. With hundreds of volunteers coming from throughout the nation, this once forgotten neighborhood is now a place of new hope and new beginnings that is receiving worldwide attention.

Community Renewal International

A garden grows where trash and bottles once filled a vacant lot. Children gather on a playground built by a local service club. Residents who were once too frightened to come out of their houses now laugh and eat together at neighborhood block parties.

“Many years ago this was one of the worst communities in the city. Homicides, crime, gang activity – you name it and it was here,” said Jewel Mariner, one of two CRI Community Coordinators in Allendale. She lives in a Friendship House that has become an anchor for the neighborhood.

“It’s amazing to see the transformation in people’s lives and in this neighborhood. People used to just call this The Hill. Now it’s New Hope Hill. People in the community now have hope.”

By the start of 2007, little more than one year after work started, 23 new houses had been built in the community. Each one has its own unique features, designs and color schemes. Several of the new homeowners have become CRI Haven House leaders and now reach out to others in the neighborhood.

“I want to be a light on the hill. I care about my community and I want us to come together,” said Dorothy Wiley, who made a new start in Shreveport after she and her family were trapped in the New Orleans Superdome for four days after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their home. “You build a neighborhood by being a neighbor to everybody. You develop relationships one person at a time.”

The Higher Ground project was launched by Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity and then later of The Fuller Center for Housing.

“We are here to transform this city. We have the opportunity to make this one of the most beautiful cities in the country,” he said. “It’s so exciting that Community Renewal International and the Friendship Houses are here. You can build houses, but if you don’t build community, it will all fall apart.”

The area’s story is no secret. Formerly thriving blocks decayed into buildingless, overgrown lots. But that is changing slowly.

Nonprofits and churches such as People of Praise, Community Renewal International, Habitat for Humanity, Mt. Canaan and Galilee Baptist churches and the Fuller Center for Housing have built dozens of homes and apartments that provide housing below market and at competitive prices. That has happened in conjunction with government plus help from private businesses.

But residences alone can’t restore a place, according to elected and unofficial community leaders. So commerce and other amenities must come next.

Allendale native Claude Marshall is trying to do that with his family’s Dale Street Grocery and Deli. The business has been open nearly a year in a building that housed a former store before it burned.

Garden of Hope - © Douglas Collier/The Times

Marshall takes a hyper local approach in his enterprise. He doesn’t sell alcohol — “seeing as how it’s destroyed the neighborhood” — and is hoping to get involved with WIC — which stands for Women, Infants, and Children — and provides money to get food for mothers and their young children.

“When you’ve got to pay somebody $5 to get something that cost $2, it just wouldn’t be feasible,” Marshall said, alluding to the cost of taxis or public transportation being too expensive. “They want something to eat without having to walk a long way to get it.”

Marshall, 55, is glad his business has seen its first Thanksgiving: “I’m in the black. I’m not in the red. I thank the loyal customers that come in every day.”

Shreveport City Councilman Calvin Lester, who has represented the neighborhoods since 2002, is thankful for business owners like Marshall.

“We have built houses and we have put people in those houses. But the thing that needs to happen now is focusing on the entrepreneurial opportunities and the economic development for the area,” Lester said. “I have said that there are some things that government does well, and there’s others it does not. I think government can build houses, but it takes more than just governmental intervention to rebuild communities.”

Empty parcels of land don’t just happen. Between 1970 and 2000, the population in Allendale shrank from 16,247 to 5,982. During that same time, Shreveport’s total residents grew nearly 10 percent from 182,064 to 200,145.

But besides new houses, Allendale and Ledbetter Heights residents have found other creative ways to rebuild.

The appropriately named Rosie Chaffold takes care of the Allendale Garden of Hope and Love. She’s a familiar face to neighbors — who honked and waved while driving by on a recent Tuesday — and she’s received media attention and accolades over the years for her work with dirt.

With lots of help from the LSU AgCenter and volunteers from outside the neighborhood, she provides plenty of green stuff for neighbors to eat, free of charge, plus well-kept flower beds. And all on a street corner where she and police say folks used to meet “for something stronger than that — something illegal.” And that would have been drugs.

But since 2001, Chaffold said, neighbors who used to ask her why she tried to make a difference occasionally stop by to help her with gardening. Now she feels gratified but hopes more nearby residents will join her. The work and the food, she said, are the bounty.

“When you’re in a garden you feel like you’re next to God, close to the Earth,” said Chaffold, a Mer Rouge native who has called Allendale home for more than three decades.

Ruth Peace has seen more changes in Allendale than Chaffold. The 89-year-old woman has lived on Buena Vista Street, where she raised a family with her late husband, since 1960. She eats a vegetable or two from the community garden now and then, and she appreciates the work that goes into it.

“I’ll be 90 years old come next August, so you know I have a whole lot to be thankful for,” Peace said. “It has changed. But there’s always room for improvement.”

By Adam Kealoha Causey • acausey@gannett.com

Source: http://www.shreveporttimes.com/article/20091128/NEWS01/911280318/1060

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 goal of the local group is building two new houses from Aug. 31 though Sept. 4.

Legacy Build Day 1 - 2009

The 39th house has been funded by First United Methodist Church, Shreveport. Lee Jeter, executive director of The Fuller Center for Housing of Northwest Louisiana, said he is still soliciting funds from several other churches for the 40th house.

Jeter has been encouraging churches in the Allendale neighborhood to participate.

He wants the churches to become aware of the Fuller Center ministry and to volunteer time even if their financial resources limit their giving, to tithe or give love offerings to help support the center’s ministry and to refer applicants for both the new houses and the Greater Blessing home rehabilitation program.

“Millard Fuller brought in resources, including $2.5 million, when he committed to building houses here,” Jeter said. “We must build on that legacy.”

Legacy Build Day 2 - 2009

The FCNWLA completed 19 houses in 2006, 14 in 2007 and 5 in 2008.

To volunteer for the Legacy Build, register by Aug. 15 at www.fullercenter.org or phone 318-221-7474.

Those who lack building skills can help with registration, prepare/serve meals, keep workers hydrated, run errands and help with cleanup.

This tragedy is especially sad for us at The Fuller Center for Housing. The First Baptist Church is one of our stalwart partners in Shreveport. From the earliest days of Building on Higher Ground the church has been a part of the project, sending volunteer work teams and sponsoring houses. Millard preached from their pulpit. As the local covenant partner was being organized Pastor Greg Hunt came forward to offer leadership and the church has been active in encouraging others to join the effort. We are deeply indebted to our friends at First Baptist and we share their grief.

Members of the 1st Baptist team in front of a house they sponsored at the Millard & Linda Fuller Build

Events like this leave you wondering what to do. You wish you could reach out and say, “It will be alright” and wipe away the tears. You wish you could explain it in a way that would comfort the families and friends. But you can’t, so we will do what we can—we’ll pray for the injured and the family of the boy who died. We’ll pray for First Baptist that they have strength and faith as they work through the difficult days ahead. We ask you to pray for them as well.

The relationship between The Fuller Center and the church is a deep and abiding one. From the earliest days of his ministry Millard looked to the church for support and began establishing partnerships that survive to this day. We’re not a church, but a servant to the church, and when the church is hurting we hurt as well. May the good Lord enfold the folks at First Baptist in his comforting arms.

Through this initiative FCNWLA has rehabilitated a number of homes in Allendale and the surrounding area.These rehabs are done in partnership with businesses and churches and can include such work as roofing, painting, plumbing and other general repairs.

Recent rehab projects and partnerships include the 315 N. Allen Ave. home of Helen Clark – Community Renewal International in partnership with Honeywell Corporation; the 1834 Garden St. home of Carrie Brayboy – Chesapeake Energy; and the Etta Williams home at 121 Leroy St. – Eldorado
Casino.

In addition students from the Huntington High School shop class built a ramp for Effie Romby at 1928 Ford Street. Job Corps members and other volunteers also painted her house.

From June 14-20, 75 people from the Central Texas Methodist Conference performed approximately 2,250 hours of service at 19 different sites, which included rehab on 10 homes, the YWCA and four Volunteer of America sites.

The group of 45 youth and 30 adults, divided into nine teams, also built four
wheelchair ramps. Noel United Methodist Church housed the participants
while they were in the area.

“We would like to give thanks to our many partners and to the Central Texas
Conference for their recent mission trip to Shreveport and the impact that their service had on our community,” said Lee Jeter, FCNWLA director. “OYEE, our community partners!”

FCNWLA screens rehab applicants as they do applicants for new houses. Owners of renovated homes receive “Greater Blessings” boxes which contain envelopes addressed to FCNWLA to be used for love offerings to help bless other families.

“We are trying to get local churches to recommend people whose homes need rehab work,” Jeter said. “We want to help those who are unable to help themselves.”

But by the time Millard asked us to stand on our chairs, to physically and visually symbolize the idea of Building on Higher Ground, I think we would have just as readily stood on a flagpole. We were that inspired.

He also shared a word new to most of us “” Oyee (Oh — yay). A word of African origin, it was a rallying cry and a shout of affirmation we would hear many times.

For Shreveport, the meeting that morning led to the 38 beautiful new homes, built by volunteers from around the nation, now standing in the Allendale neighborhood. Millard committed to at least 60, and I have no doubt we will reach that number.

For me, that meeting led to one of the greatest honors of my life: to work with and for one of the truly heroic servant leaders of our time. Millard made $1 million before he was 30, but when it nearly cost him his marriage, he gave it all away, took his family to the mission field and then returned home to start Habitat for Humanity. Under his leadership, Habitat housed more than one million people in 100 nations.

Millard died from heart failure in an ambulance not far from his Georgia home Feb. 3, one month after his 74th birthday. Despite his age, his sudden death came as an absolute shock. He had tremendous energy and often seemed to have a hammer in one hand and a cell phone in the other.

Community Renewal International founder Mack McCarter drove to Georgia soon after the hurricane to meet with Millard, a longtime friend, and to seek the help of The Fuller Center for Housing in Shreveport. Millard answered the call like a father rushing to the bedside of a sick child. He visited Allendale and saw in his visionary mind more than houses for hurricane evacuees. He saw something few Shreveporters ever imagined for that crime-ridden area “” a new community. Today on these streets of Allendale, where flowers bloom and children play outside, we can see what Millard saw back in 2005.

Millard spoke so often about Shreveport in his travels the past three years that the Chamber of Commerce should have put him on the payroll. He believed in this city with a force that put many of us to shame.

Ever smiling, always optimistic, he challenged us to stop driving by our downtrodden communities as though they don’t even exist. Because of Millard, many people who never dared go into Allendale volunteered to build houses there and now have friends there.

Millard made Shreveport a better place. He made the world a better place.

He also sensed that his time with us was drawing to a close. The last time I heard Millard preach was in Union Church of San Salvador before the start of the Millard and Linda Fuller Blitz Build last fall.

“I started Habitat for Humanity when I was 40 and I started The Fuller Center when I was 70. I tell people I have to go faster now because I have less time,” he said that morning in El Salvador. “When you are approaching the goal line, when you are coming to the end, you need to speed up, not slow down. My philosophy is you oughta wear out instead of rusting out.”

Millard certainly did not rust out, and I don’t think he wore out, either. I would rather believe that God needed another builder for the mansions in heaven and he gave Millard a new assignment.

We miss you terribly, Millard, but it is a well-deserved promotion. I only hope the angels remembered to shout Oyee when you arrived.

© David Westerfield

David Westerfield is the director of communications for Community Renewal International and a member of the board of The Fuller Center of Northwest Louisiana.

Despite facing 40-degree weather, they prayed for his new house to become a home and that he lives a life of hope.

“Thanks for the power to transform strangers into neighbors and to add to the fiber of a neighorhood,” prayed Greg Hunt, senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Shreveport.

Brown, along with his new neighbor, Latrice Bell, is the latest person to receive a house from the Fuller Center for Housing of Northwest Louisiana. In partnership with Community Renewal International, and area churches such as First Baptist Church of Shreveport and First United Methodist Church, the nonprofit dedicated two new houses in the Allendale area.

“This is a dual celebration,” said Averil Miles, executive director of the local Fuller Center in front of a small crowd. “We must give honor to God. A lot of sweat and tears have gone into these houses.”

The Fuller Center was founded in the area in 2005 after hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Louisiana coastline. Founder Millard Fuller pledged to build about 60 dwellings for low-income residents and those the storms left homeless. The local affiliate struck out on its own in November 2007 and organized a housing blitz. Last year, nine homes were built and were sold with no-interest mortgages to low-income families.

Next year, the local chapter will construct its 40th house.

On Friday, Brown stood outside of his house, smiling and greeting the people who came to wish him well. Originally from Bastrop and one of 11 siblings, he’s lived in Shreveport for six years and moved into his home on Alston on Saturday.

“It’s breathtaking,” he said. “When your a child you always dream of having something of your own. God saw fit to give me land to build a house.”

Volunteers from First Baptist helped finance and build Brown’s home. Volunteers from First United Methodist and students from Job Corps helped build Bell’s home.

Hunt, said the church also helped construct three other houses in Allendale.

“This is the joyful part of this,” he said

Mack McCarter, coordinator of Community Renewal International, said Friday’s event was another symbol of the neighbor’s change.

“Standing on this corner in 2004, this area was inhabited by gang members every day,” he said. “As you can see, the shotgun houses are gone. What we have witnessed is a true transfer from despair to hope.”

For Brown, hope has three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room.

“I never thought there were still some good people in the world,” he said.

© Icess Feandez/Shreveport-Times – ifernandez@gannett.com