Partnership with Saint Kate’s Improves our Accessibility Services

We are extremely proud of our partnership with Saint Catherine University’s graduate Occupational Therapy program and Associate Professor Catherine Sullivan.

Through this partnership, we collaborate on service-learning projects that involve graduate occupational therapy (OT) students evaluating the homes of low-income older adults for safety and making recommendations for modifications designed to reduce the risk of falls and other injuries. Our volunteers and/or contractors then make the modifications that are within the scope of our programs. St. Kate’s OT students have completed more than 150 occupational therapy assessments for homeowners in need through this partnership over the last five years.

With the support of the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS), we expanded this partnership in 2014 and 2015 to implement more sophisticated assessment tools and conduct an outcome study, which resulted in the publication of a thesis.  This study shows how in-home environmental modifications can have a statistically significant impact on improving the mobility of older adults throughout his or her community and within the home, reducing the fear of falling, and increasing the satisfaction and level of performance in completing home occupational tasks.

Our collaboration with Professor Sullivan and her students has enabled Rebuilding Together Twin Cities to provide accessibility modifications for low-income seniors that are tailored specifically to their individual needs and home environment.  As a result, we are able to better-serve older adults, allowing them to remain in their homes and neighborhoods for longer.  This partnership has served as a catalyst for us to expand our accessibility modification programs to include larger modifications that facilitate single-level living and aging-in-place.  It has also fundamentally changed how we evaluate our accessibility programs.  We have moved far beyond traditional homeowner satisfaction surveys to a more robust, quantitative pre- and post-project assessment process that can provide statistical data showing the impact of our work.  Professor Sullivan and her students have been an important resource in our efforts to help older adults age-in-place successfully and this collaboration has elevated the level of understanding of this work among our staff, Board members, volunteers, and supporters.

We are grateful to Professor Sullivan and her students and look forward to continuing this partnership!

Safe and Healthy Housing in the Twin Cities

Rebuilding Together Twin Cities believes that everyone deserves to live independently in a safe and healthy home, which is why safe and healthy housing is the foundation, framework and focus of all our programs and projects. Current research makes clear that our homes can negatively impact our health and put occupants at high risk for fires, falls, moisture and mold, asthma and allergies, toxic exposures such as carbon monoxide, and various other hazards. Many interventions have been proven effective in reducing and preventing these risks and, in many cases, the repairs are relatively simple and cost very little. However, low-income homeowners often do not have the resources needed to address these hazards in their homes.

The Rebuilding Together affiliate network has embraced safe and healthy housing as our strategic focus, and we are working to incorporate the National Center for Healthy Housing’s Seven Principles of Healthy Homes into practice.  Keep the home:

  1. Dry
  2. Clean
  3. Ventilated
  4. Pest-free
  5. Safe
  6. Contaminant-free
  7. Maintained

Together with the National Center for Healthy Housing, our network has identified 25 Safe and Healthy Home Priorities that can be used to identify safety and health-related issues at each home before the project and to measure the health and safety improvements resulting from our work. Ensuring that low-income homeowners in our community have a safe and healthy home has long been a focus of our work; however, by incorporating these Principles and Priorities founded in scientific research, we hope to further our impact on the safety and health of individual homeowners and neighborhoods in need and more accurately measure and evaluate that impact.

Kathy and Tony Attend Kickoff to Rebuild in Houston

As you probably already know, Super Bowl 52 will be held at the U.S. Bank Stadium here in Minneapolis in 2018!  Each year, Rebuilding Together partners with the NFL in Super Bowl cities to repair homes and revitalize entire neighborhoods. Over the last 22 years, Rebuilding Together and the NFL have repaired nearly 140 homes and engaged 5,000 volunteers in Super Bowl cities across the country through Kickoff to Rebuild.  We are thrilled that the Super Bowl and Kickoff to Rebuild will be here in 2018!

In preparation for this event, Kathy Greiner and Tony Sjogren recently traveled to Houston where Rebuilding Together Houston was hosting the 2017 Super Bowl Kickoff to Rebuild. Kathy and Tony were able to work hand-in-hand with the Rebuilding Together’s national office and Rebuilding Together Houston to get a firsthand view of what Kickoff to Rebuild is all about. Our team is planning to put a Minnesota twist on this wonderful event next year that will further our mission to transform the lives of low-income homeowners by improving the safety and health of their homes and revitalizing our communities.

Kathy and Tony want to thank the Rebuilding Together Houston and the Rebuilding Together national team for inviting us down to Houston to experience an amazing event!

AmeriCorps Perspective: MLK Week of Service Trip

Written by our AmeriCorps Members: Steven Abrams and Jacob Ames

This January, Rebuilding Together held its annual MLK Week of Service in Lafayette, Louisiana, a town hard hit by last August’s massive floods. CapacityCorps members from Rebuilding Together affiliates nationwide converged on Cajun Country, and in conjunction with AmeriCorps members serving locally, performed a wide-range of renovations on a half dozen homes and a local Boys & Girls Club. Jacob was most proud of a ramp he and his team built that provided a homeowner easy access to his shed, while Steven took satisfaction in the role he played in constructing a drainage trench.

After several days of hard work, Steven and Jacob were afforded the opportunity to visit New Orleans for some much welcome R & R. Joined by a dozen other CapacityCorps members, the MLK Week of Service came to a celebratory close in the Crescent City. All told, the project was a major success, with Rebuilding Together CapacityCorps members providing material, as well as emotional uplift, to the aching but undeterred communities of Acadiana.