A $50,000 grant from the Allegan County Community Foundation (ACCF) has enabled Lakeshore Habitat for Humanity (LHFH) to hire its first home repair coordinator and now serve Allegan County.
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Courtesy LHFHJackson Nickolay will oversee the Lakeshore Habitat for Humanity Critical Home Repair Program.
Jackson Nickolay will oversee its Critical Home Repair Program, which also serves Ottawa and Van Buren counties. LHFH helps build and improve homes for families of low-income or disadvantaged backgrounds, while its Critical Home Repair Program helps people repair their current homes.
The grant money from ACCF will be dispersed over four years. Other sources, including the Holland Community Foundation, will help fund Nickolay’s salary, according to Dave Rozman, Lakeshore Habitat for Humanity’s senior director of development.
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Courtesy LHFHDave Rozman, Lakeshore Habitat for Humanity’s senior director of development.
“We’ve been doing critical home repair mainly in the greater Holland area for a number of years now,” says Rozman, “and we’ve been limited to the Holland area based on staff capacity and the partnership we’ve had with the city of Holland. So this is expanding it to the Allegan geographical service area.
“We’ve had calls for repair from that area, and we wanted to expand to Allegan. A big part of why we couldn’t is we didn’t have the staff to take that on.”
Making ‘a broader impact’
The timing was right to hire Nickolay because a lot of state funding for critical care home repair programs is available, adds Rozman.
“This hiring is going to market the program to the community to make them aware that this is a resource,” he says.
Nickolay, 33, who is from Grand Marais, Minnesota, previously helped refurbish student housing when he was studying at Western Theological Seminary in Holland. The opportunity to help people on a broader scale drew him to LHFH’s coordinator position.
“I was really grateful for that experience and that chance to learn along those lines (at the seminary),” adds Nickolay, “So when I saw this position posted, I thought it was a great way to have a broader impact, more communitywide impact in the housing sphere.
“The coordinator position is a collaborative role with other agencies that are doing good work, so we’ll kind of team up together to have a broader impact.”
A comprehensive housing assessment for Allegan County published in fall 2023 shows Allegan not only faces a shortage of new housing (a 6,200-unit gap over the next five years) but also needs to maintain and repair existing housing.
“We have a 6,200 housing gap across the county, and the easiest way for that to not grow is to keep people in the homes they already have,” says Stephanie Calhoun, president/CEO of the Allegan County Community Foundation. “We decided that this was a good investment.”
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Courtesy LHFHLakeshore Habitat for Humanity serves Ottawa, Allegan, and Van Buren counties.
Volunteers pitch in
The qualifications for the Critical Home Repair Program are similar to the home ownership program. The applicant’s household income needs to be between 30-80% of the area median Income and the family would not be able to complete the repairs without some assistance.
LHFH uses volunteer labor where possible to keep costs low and provides either a grant or a interest-free loan to complete the work.
Homes must be owner-occupied and must be a house, though limited mobile home repairs can be made through approved contractors/partners.
Exterior projects include painting, siding, windows, exterior structures, roofs and roof
repair, porches and wheelchair ramps. Interior projects include HVAC, bathrooms, flooring, painting, ceiling and wall repairs, light fixtures and plumbing.
Sue Sal, who’s been volunteering on home projects since 2018 and works part-time as a staff receptionist for LHFH, says the work is gratifying.
Before volunteering, Sal never swung a hammer in her life, but she didn’t let
that stop her.
‘I had never done carpentry,” she says. “I started in 2018 as a volunteer, and site supervisors trained me on the various tasks we were working on. We all learned as we went.”
Sal says she took the plunge as a volunteer builder because she was ready for a change of scenery.
“I worked for well over 30 years in the corporate office and wanted to get away from the desk and do something outside,” she says. “I’ve heard about Habitat for Humanity from friends that had some experience from them, so I joined the women’s build one day and had so much fun with all the women, so I said ‘yes.’”
Sal, who lives in Allegan County, looks forward to refurbishing homes there.