This February and March, Bethany has been raising money to help build a house for an Elkhart family through Habitat for Humanity. Habitat is a unique housing charity because it offers a path to homeownership for those who haven’t been able to get houses otherwise, or who have lost their homes in natural disasters. People work on their own houses, investing their own labor into “sweat equity.” Habitat also gives people affordable mortgages along with financial literacy education.
Bethany’s fundraising was student-driven, with students asking donations from their families and churches. For a final kick to finish off the fundraiser, Bethany principal Hank Willems came up with a novel fundraising idea that really got students excited: he proposed that students could use each dollar of money they raised to vote for a student or faculty member to be stuck to a wall using duct tape. This motivated students to raise more money, and Jonah Farran (’19) and Michael Yeakey (high school English teacher) were duly taped to the wall on Monday after receiving the most dollar votes. Fundraising concluded with over 10,000 dollars for Habitat for Humanity.
There will be a frame-build in mid-March at Bethany in which students and faculty will construct the frame of the house, a “skeleton” that will be used to build the main structure of the house. An Interterm group of Bethany students will do finishing work on the house, such as painting.