Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Aggie Habitat for Humanity


Aggie Habitat for Humanity is a club I've been wanting to join lately as I volunteered last semester with St. Mary's Catholic Church to help paint a house for community service. It was a great experience and I have volunteered with the less fortunant before at my local chuch, St. Jude's Catholic Church, back in my home town over breaks. This is a great club to consider joining because not only does it help out the community, but in the process you learn about construction methods which are always a plus for an aspiring architecture student, but also life lessons and relationships you learn along the way. It's not just about building a house as I came to learn, it's so much more than that. You help create a home for family that wants to better themselves and essentially shelter the future, their children and builders of tommorrow's society. At the same time you're making friends and helping build apart of your own society.
The goals the club promotes is to create low cost homes where since labor is on volunteer basis so it's essentially free for the owner, but all the owner has to pay for is the materials over the course of 30 years with no interest. It is an attainable goal for them and it helps give them back a little part of their dignity back. The organization is founded by a Christian group, but is open to all volunteers regardless of faith or culture. There is expectations to meet in regards to the club in that if you say you'll join and volunteer you have to show up, there is no room for wishy-washy flip flopper behavior as each house takes at least 500 hours to make given that all the volunteers are present. On the contrary, it is very easy to sign up for by simply entering your email and the club is very structural with officers and activities planned out. The way I see it as with most passions is if you love what you're doing and you're helping others then you'll want to show up to lend a helping hand and those expectations will be met and if need be you'll be accomidated by your situation and talking to offers. The main idea is get involved and see how you can make a difference, every little helps, so that being said, I think I just convinced myself to join the local Aggie chapter, you should to.

Here is the link to the Aggie Habitat for Humanity official website main page where you can sign up for the following semester and learn more about what the club has to offer:
http://habitat.tamu.edu/

Mission Statement:
http://habitat.tamu.edu/about/mission.asp

How to become a member:
http://habitat.tamu.edu/members/member.asp

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