Thanks to a $50,000 donation from the Allegan County Community Foundation (ACCF), Lakeshore Habitat for Humanity (LHFH) was able to hire its first home repair coordinator and now serves Allegan County.
Courtesy of LHFHJackson Nickolay will oversee Lakeshore Habitat for Humanity’s Critical Home Repair program.
Jackson Nickolay will oversee the Critical Home Repair Program, which also serves Ottawa and Van Buren counties. LHFH helps build and renovate homes for low-income or vulnerable families, while the Critical Home Repair Program helps people repair their current homes.
The ACCF grant will be distributed over four years. Other sources, including the Holland Community Foundation, will fund Nickolay’s salary, said Dave Rozman, senior development director for Lakeshore Habitat for Humanity.
Courtesy of LHFHDave Rozman, senior development director for Lakeshore Habitat for Humanity.
“We have been doing essential home repairs primarily in the greater Holland area for a number of years,” says Rozman, “and due to staffing capacity and our partnership with the City of Holland, we were limited to the greater Holland area. This is now being expanded to include Allegan’s geographic service area.”
“We had repair requests from that area and wanted to expand to Allegan. A big reason we weren’t able to do that was because we didn’t have the staff to handle it.”
Achieve a “broader impact”
The timing of hiring Nickolay was right because there is plenty of government funding available for programs to repair intensive care homes, Rozman adds.
“With this new hire, we want to market the program to the community and make them aware that it is a resource,” he says.
Nickolay, 33, of Grand Marais, Minnesota, helped renovate student housing while studying at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, and the opportunity to help people on a larger scale led him to the coordinator position at LHFH.
“I was really grateful for that experience and the opportunity to learn in that regard (at the seminary),” Nickolay adds. “So when I saw the job posting, I thought this would be a great opportunity to have a bigger impact, a bigger impact on the entire community in the housing sector.”
“The coordinator position is a collaboration with other agencies that are doing good work, so we will join forces to have a bigger impact.”
A comprehensive housing assessment for Allegan County, released in fall 2023, shows that Allegan faces not only a shortage of new housing (a gap of 6,200 housing units over the next five years), but also a shortage of maintenance and repair of existing housing.
“We have a housing gap of 6,200 people across the county, and the easiest way to fill that gap is to keep people in the housing they already have,” says Stephanie Calhoun, president and CEO of the Allegan County Community Foundation. “We decided this was a good investment.”
Courtesy of LHFHLakeshore Habitat for Humanity serves Ottawa, Allegan and Van Buren counties.
Volunteers help
The requirements for the Critical Home Repair Program are similar to those for the Home Ownership Program. The applicant’s household income must be between 30 and 80 percent of the area median income and the family would not be able to make the repairs without assistance.
To keep costs low, LHFH uses volunteers wherever possible and provides either a grant or an interest-free loan to carry out the work.
Homes must be occupied by the owner and must be a residential home, however limited repairs to mobile homes may be performed by approved contractors/partners.
Exterior projects include painting, siding, windows, exterior structures, roofs and roof
Repairs, porches and wheelchair ramps. Interior projects include HVAC, bathrooms, flooring, painting, ceiling and wall repairs, light fixtures and plumbing.
Sue Sal, who has been volunteering on residential projects since 2018 and works part-time as a receptionist for LHFH, says the work is fulfilling.
Before her volunteer work, Sal had never wielded a hammer in her life, but she did not let
that stops them.
“I had never done any carpentry work before,” she says. “I started as a volunteer in 2018 and was trained by the site managers on the different tasks we were working on. We all learned as we went along.”
Sal says she took the plunge as a volunteer construction worker because she was ready for a change of scenery.
“I worked at the corporate headquarters for over 30 years and wanted to get out of the office and do something outside,” she says. “Friends who had experience there told me about Habitat for Humanity. So one day I got involved in the women’s building project and had so much fun with the other women that I said ‘yes.'”
Sal, who lives in Allegan County, is looking forward to renovating homes there.
