It’s National Rebuilding Month!

Did you know that April is National Rebuilding Month?  Nearly 40,000 volunteers will serve in more than 1,600 rebuild projects led by Rebuilding Together affiliates across the country this month.

Throughout April, Rebuilding Together affiliates and volunteers will serve veterans, older adults, low-income families with children and victims of disaster by providing them with a variety of critical home repairs, including: flooring repairs and replacement, weatherization repairs, roof and handrail replacements, accessibility modifications, painting, landscaping and other major home rehabilitations. The repairs are provided free of charge to the homeowners who, often faced with diminishing resources, must choose food and medicine over critical home repairs — choices that, over time, can lead to crumbling foundations, dangerously sagging roofs and windows and doors that can’t be securely shut.

In our community, Rebuilding Together Twin Cities is hosting several home repair projects and a nonprofit facility improvement project during National Rebuilding Month. We are proud to be part of this nationwide effort to improve the homes and lives of those in need during National Rebuilding Month!

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.