The painters were on rooftops and ladders. The other crew members filled a dumpster with debris that had been littering a two-block area around Cass Community Social Services’ campus in Highland Park.
The common thread was that they were all volunteers — more than two dozen strong — and all members of Mitch Albom’s A Time to Help team that answered the call to service last Saturday (April 8) to help Cass Community’s Tiny Homes neighborhood.
The home ownership program will be completed later this year with 25 homes; six have been built so far. The residents will have a combination of experiences (formerly homeless people, senior citizens, college students, etc.), but all will qualify as low-income. At first, the residents will rent the homes. Anyone who remains for seven years will be given the opportunity to own the home and property, said Rev. Faith Fowler, executive director at CCSS.
“This is a great project, but without the volunteers we’d really be limited in what we can do,” she said.
Fowler praised Albom — S.A.Y. Detroit’s founder — for his commitment to continue to support Cass Community, and other local nonprofits, through his fundraising and volunteer efforts.
“The fact that Mitch helps people — you don’t always think about local things because there are natural disasters and poverty elsewhere in the world — yet he manages to see that it’s all related, and to help people wherever the need is,” she said. “What a giant of a man he is, and how blessed we are that he’s a part of our community.”
ATTH’s next project is slated for May 20 at the Detroit Zoo. Signup will be open in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime if you’re new to A Time to Help, you can register an account with our volunteer software CERVIS and set up a volunteer profile by clicking here.