Healing Hearts Through Housing

Project Overview

In August and September of 2005 respectively, two strong hurricanes hit the Gulf coast of the United States, Hurricanes Katrina, and Rita. Berean Baptist Church was prompted by the Holy Spirit to provide help for those suffering from the devastation. Beginning in September 2005, offerings were taken up and money and supplies sent to help people recover from the storm.

From the outset of the project, Pastor Bill and Mary Colace, recognizing that the needs in this disaster area would be long term, had decided that they wanted Berean's work in this regard to be a long term effort. So from almost the outset, Mari & Pastor Bill were looking for a way to continue to help people in the disaster area on a more long term basis.

In September, Pastor Bill met Mr. Ray Swatkowski from the Baptist General Conference in the airport. Through the course of their discussions, Pastor Bill learned that the BGC who was involved in initial discussions with Shelter For Life in Oshkosh, WI about developing a pilot project for a new concept in disaster relief. The idea was to build a pre-fabricated house in a community remote from the hurricane destruction area using local resources, and then ship it to the relief area. Pastor Bill agreed to pursue this concept with a team of people from Berean.

On November 15, 2005, a meeting was held at Berean Baptist Church with about 30 people attending. People who had either expressed interest in helping with hurricane relief and people who had been involved in previous building projects, were invited (there was not a general invitation to the congregation). At the meeting, Harry Van Burik from Shelter for Life presented the idea of the pilot project and people were generally excited about the idea. The basic concept was to use local resources (both materials and personnel) to build a prefabricated house to be shipped to the relief area. This would have the following benefits:

• It would avoid the confusion and material constraints that typically occur in a disaster area.
• It would also take advantage of people's desire to help both financially and personally in the local community.
• It would actually be a help to people who wish to contribute physically but could not afford (either in time or funds) to travel to the disaster area for a week or more, by allowing them to be involved on evenings and weekends.
• It would also afford the local church(s) involved to work with their local community and thereby have an opportunity to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We've now completed the project and have put together a set of documents intended to help other accomplish a similar project should they choose to.
Project Documents
Project Photo Report