Extreme Makeover: Hope Haven Edition

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HOPE HAVEN EDIT

the trinity voice / spring 2016

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EXTREME MAKEOVER:

WOW (WithOut Walls) Week at Trinity has served as a rite of passage for our 5th-8th grade students for the past 13 years. Trinity puts “regular” classes on hold and sends students out into the world to learn various lessons through real life interaction with their community and beyond. This year, Josh Thornton, inspired and impassioned by working with Hope Haven, one of our 8th grade Service Learning partners this year, proposed our first annual “Extreme Makeover: TES Edition”. I eagerly signed on along with a few trusty alumni parent volunteers; the next

thing we knew, we found ourselves in the thick of the EXTREME part of a makeover project. If you have not seen the actual Extreme Makeover television show, here is a little explanation: The show revolves around a team of designers, contractors and architects reworking the visual appearance of an entire home in one week with a limited budget. We took this concept to Hope Haven, and they LOVED the idea of having our students renovate the younger kids’ play room. As we prepared our plans for WOW Week, we added more rooms to be renovated.

By the time it was all said and done, we renovated four rooms and added a few sparkly touches to some recently renovated rooms. Our budget was by no means a TV budget but rather a real-life nonprofit kind of budget! There was no way we could “buy” the things needed for these rooms; so we went to the drawing board, asked for donations, cruised Craigslist, begged for discounts and learned to work around the colors offered in the “oops” paint section at Home Depot. Once the group of students was assembled, we were off to the races.

LIFE LESSON #1: RENOVATION = MANUAL LABOR The students spent the first morning learning how to clean (yes, we taught them how to mop, sweep and sanitize a countertop) before we even set off for Hope Haven. We also had the task of packing all the donated furniture items onto a borrowed trailer and into cars. There were so many trips from the carpool line to the track that we were dizzy by the end. The spatially-minded students quickly took over packing the trailer and cars while the rest became the pack mules carrying everything out. Once we got to Hope Haven, we unpacked the

trailer and cars into the two staging rooms,then headed to the four rooms we were renovating and began to completely empty them of all the existing furniture, books, toys, rugs...and all before lunch on the first day! As the week progressed, the manual labor simply increased as we moved furniture, built lofts and tables, primed and painted benches, and taped and painted walls. At the end of each day, students and adults were physically wiped-out. Students proclaimed that they didn’t know their arm muscles could hurt so much after just painting!


LIFE LESSON #3: THE RIGHT TOOLS MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE

Jen Rankey K-8 Art Teacher Wildcat Since 2000

TION

The most frustrating of moments came at the hands of dead batteries that stalled momentum or extension cords that were not quite long enough.

THIS PROJECT INSPIRED OUR RESIDENTS TO TAKE PRIDE AND OWNERSHIP OF HOPE HAVEN. THANK YOU TO ALL OF THE STUDENTS, TEACHERS AND PARENTS WHO WERE INVOLVED IN THIS SPECIAL PROJECT. THIS WAS SUCH A GIFT TO OUR ORGANIZATION. Kristi DeMeritte, Hope Haven Volunteer Coodinator LIFE LESSON #2: RENOVATION REQUIRES PERSISTENCE & FLEXIBILITY Each room presented a different challenge for the students to solve. The Unification Room needed an adult and child-friendly atmosphere. The Playroom needed to be a safe and stimulating environment, and the Women’s Living Room needed a sense of home and practical usability. All this needed to be done with a hodge-podge assortment of “stuff.” In comes the flexibility and go-with-the-flow attitude. The students had to repurpose furniture by painting and recovering, and they needed to completely build new pieces of furniture. In the playroom, a loft was to be installed. The loft was a free Craigslist find with “easy to follow” directions. Now was when the persistence came

into play! The directions were not as “easy” as one would think. By the end of the day, a group of students along with Mr. Thornton sat in the middle of the playroom with 40 pieces of marked wood, a load of screws and bolts and puzzling installation instructions. At the same moment, another group was working in the Unification Room to build a bench out of a variety of donated storage cubes. The cubes needed to be attached in a safe and sturdy manner using only the limited tools and hardware we had at our disposal. In both cases, the life lesson of persistence was alive and well. The loft made it up and the Unification Room was gifted a seating area AND a new entertainment center with the storage cubes.

Hope Haven, provides life skills for more than 300 homeless, chemically dependent adults and their families within a supportive residential environment, leading to independence. For more information, visit www.HopeHavenInc.org.

LIFE LESSON #4: SERVING A COMMUNITY IN NEED IS VERY INSPIRING! Here is the heart of this WOW week experience: Service Learning is powerful for students, teachers and the wider community. By the end of the week, residents at Hope Haven and our students knew one another by name. The Trinity students were no longer renovating a playroom for random kids, they were doing it for Chance. Chance is a young boy who lives with his mom at Hope Haven and kept a keen eye on the students’ progress throughout the week. A resident tearfully thanked the Trinity students for renovating the Unification Room because she had an upcoming visit with her daughter and the space was so inviting and fresh. It was suddenly real for the students, not an abstract concept but a real moment in time that had a lasting impact. As the students worked in the Women’s Living Rooms, they received constant praise from the women who couldn’t wait to have a space in which to relax and socialize that felt like a real home. The students gave and received high fives from Hope Haven residents who had just finished training or started jobs. They celebrated the amazing and resilient people that live and work at Hope Haven as much as the people at Hope Haven celebrated them. Simply put, our Trinity students, teachers and parents lived into the mission of Trinity Episcopal School in an authentic and powerful way, and because of that, lives were changed.

the trinity voice / spring 2016

From electric screwdrivers to circular saws, the students gained confidence each day with these valuable tools, allowing them the opportunity to think outside of the box.

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To accomplish this renovation, the students had to learn how to use a variety of power tools, painting tools and cleaning tools safely.


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