Looking out the window of a bedroom in a recently dedicated Habitat for Humanity house, Brent Wiederhold said everything hit him in that moment.
It was just an empty room, but all the work that had been put into building the house combined with his own experiences of growing up and experiencing life in his own room made him fully realize the work that had been completed.
“They’re going to experience an entire lifetime of meaning right there,” he said.
Wiederhold, a senior studying biochemistry, is the secretary of the IU chapter of Habitat for Humanity. The group is part of the international organization of Habitat, which is intended to build safe and affordable housing across the globe, IU chapter president Christina Zerfas said.
The IU chapter dedicated its first house in Monroe County in 18 years Saturday.
Zerfas said students’ renting apartments in Bloomington increases the rent in Monroe County. This has caused the county to have the highest poverty rate in Indiana and makes affordable rent hard to come by for many families in the area.
“We’re not necessarily to blame because we’re moving here and attending university here, but we are a leading cause of why it is this way, and that makes it ever more pertinent that we give back and make that difference,” she said.
Zerfas, a senior studying entrepreneurship and corporate innovation, has been involved with the organization for seven years. She started with Bloomington High School North’s chapter. She got involved with the IU chapter her sophomore year as the fundraising director. Wiederhold and IU chapter vice president Stewart Rivers got involved the same year with the program and in the funding board under Zerfas.
“It was Christina’s fault,” Wiederhold said. “She pulled a bunch of us together her sophomore year, people she had known our freshman year, and told us, ‘We’ve got this huge problem and it’s up to us to solve it.’”
Fundraising for the house takes a variety of forms. Zerfas explained how the group has a couple of big events, including a rake-a-thon in the fall; “Houses for Houses,” the building of the Midwest’s largest gingerbread house in Dunn Meadow in December; and a 5K in the spring. The group also goes canning, has donation campaigns and offers “Henna for Habitat” around spring break and “Headshots for Habitat” to raise additional funds.
Zerfas said, starting her sophomore year, they “aggressively reset” the IU chapter goals. She said when she started, the group raised about $3,000 a year, but the board made it a goal that year to raise enough funds to sponsor and build a house in the next couple of years.
For the first time in 18 years the IU chapter of Habitat for Humanity was able to dedicate a house. The house was co-sponsored with Bloomington’s Evangelical Community Church. Zerfas, Wiederhold and Rivers helped raise $17,000 their sophomore year and $19,000 their junior year to hit the total.
The organization is currently on track to raise another $35,000 by the end of this school year to co-sponsor another house next year.
Sponsoring a house means supporting the project financially. Support includes manual labor, too, by sending volunteers to the construction site. The IU chapter sends volunteers to help on Saturdays, though volunteers will also go out to a house site to help the Monroe County chapter.
The house the group helped co-sponsor is located on the northwest side of Bloomington off the B-Line bike trail. It is a part of Trail View Neighborhood, which is composed of other Habitat for Humanity houses.
“This is the first time that they are sponsoring a fully Habitat neighborhood to increase that community of people who have walked a similar path,” Zerfas said. “They can literally help build their neighbor’s home.”
A family, made up of two parents and their two young children, will move into the recently dedicated house in April. Rivers said the family had moved 14 times in 15 years due to high rent costs.
The family was paired with the IU chapter by the Monroe County Habitat affiliate because the family was composed of a younger couple and two young kids.
Working with the family was an amazing experience, the chapter leaders said.
“It definitely inspires volunteers to go ahead and build more,” Rivers said. “When they’ve met the partner family, they’ve swung a hammer alongside them, it definitely motivates people to get out and help as much as we can.”
The work the organization did was demonstrated at the house dedication on Saturday.
The ceremony included sponsor and homeowner speeches, a ribbon cutting, the key passing and prayers over the house. Volunteers and families alike shared their experiences and motivations with Habitat for Humanity at the ceremony.
“Saturday was such an inspiring day because, on top of everything else, it represented a unified effort in a world that’s currently so divided,” Zerfas said. “Going into a community where we saw that everybody was working to literally raise the walls around one another was so important and so heart-warming.”
