Habitat for Humanity Collegiate Challenge Summary:
I have been working with the Engineers Without Borders organization since the beginning of my college career and have been getting more involved with the organization throughout my time at UC. I am currently the Internal Vice-President of our chapter, which means that I am in charge of all of our international and domestic projects. Currently, one of our largest local partners is Habitat for Humanity and we usually volunteer with them a couple times a year. This year we decided, in light of all the natural disasters that have occurred this past year, we could use our talents as engineers to serve a community over our winter break. After doing some research, we discovered that Habitat for Humanity does a collegiate challenge for college students. This challenge allowed us to learn more about Habitat for Humanity and to also go out into the community and help improve housing. The first day that we were there we worked in the Habitat for Humanity Restore. The Habitat for Humanity Restore is a place where donated items are sold and the proceeds go towards funding the building of more houses in the area. While we were there, we helped by going out to homes and picking up some larger donations. For the rest of the week we worked on a home restoration. The way a home restoration works is that the homeowner contacts Habitat and says that they need help fixing parts of their home. Habitat then agrees to come out and fix the home and only charges the homeowner the cost of the materials. This allows people, who could not normally afford home repairs, to get the help that they need. At the home restoration we were sent to, the homeowner had a leaky roof and a porch that had serious termite damage. Throughout the week we worked with the owner to make sure that their house was safe and leak free for the winter. This trip was a great opportunity and I hope I will be able to go on more trips like this one in the future.
Sample Work:
The following slideshow shows pictures off all of the work that we did in Winston-Salem. The pictures show many of the things we did each day while we were there, as well as some of the hiking trails that we explored. Some of the projects that we completed were fixing a leaky roof, volunteering at the Habitat for Humanity Restore, tearing out an unstable front porch and building a new one, and building a railing to help a homeowner walk up their driveway. I have also included my daily reflection from the trip.
ewb-habitat_for_humanity_trip_reflection.pdf | |
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