Paul Holm, executive director of Rebuilding Together Northeast Ohio, is concerned about Northeast Ohio’s aging population. In some cases, senior citizens, especially those on fixed incomes, have trouble maintaining their homes and don’t have the money to afford repairs. For some, this can pose a significant health and safety risk, and the problem is only expected to get worse.
According to Holm, the population of those over the age of 65 in Northeast Ohio is expected to increase by more than 30 percent between 2004 and 2020, could double by 2030 and then increase almost as much again by 2050.
“That’s why an organization like ours that can leverage what the government has available, the goodness of communities — whether they be corporations or civic groups or faith communities — bringing those resources in a way that we can stretch available resources, leverage the sweat equity that each of us can, in our own way, offer and hopefully make a significant difference for those people,” he says.
Severity of need
Rebuilding Together works to improve existing homes in Summit, Stark, Cuyahoga, Medina, Portage and Lake counties with its nine-member staff. Representatives visit the house of a family in need and fix its most dire problems — those that may pose a safety or health risk to the residents. That can range from installing a handle bar in the bathroom to decluttering rooms in a house. Volunteers fill in the gaps, with as few as three or as many as 100 volunteers working on a project. In 2014, some 600 people volunteered.
The organization, working from the same 900-square-foot house in Akron that it’s been in for a decade, is trying to figure out a way to service the needs in its expanding coverage area by establishing a model that can be replicated in each community, or at least at the county level. It’s looking for local ownership so that the nonprofit can address disparate local needs.
“The severity of that need is going to be different in each community, the partnerships are going to be different in each community, the resources are going to be different in each community. That’s a huge challenge for us,” Holm says.
Funds and resources are unique in each community, meaning that funds raised in Akron stay in Akron. But the organization has developed regional and national partners that have more than a local community focus to leverage those resources across the board. This allows Rebuilding Together to share overhead such as equipment to save each local community significant dollars that they may have had to go out and raise on their own had they not been part of a regional model.
Worries and worst days
Still, as the only nonprofit repairing existing homes in the area, it’s tough to keep up with current demand, let alone future needs.
“I would estimate our organization is probably serving about 1 percent of the current need in the counties that we serve,” Holm says. “If we can’t keep up with population growth in terms of increasing our impact on an annual basis, we’ll just keep going below 1 percent. We are not keeping up as well as we’d like to be, certainly.”
He says statistics indicate that there are over 20,000 homeowners in the territories the nonprofit services with extremely low income who are in need of help. In 2014, Rebuilding Together received over 1,000 calls for help, most of those in Summit County. That’s expected to increase once the organization ramps up services in the counties on the periphery of its core service area. At the time of the interview, 134 people were on its waiting list.
And that’s what worries him most — that Rebuilding Together will not be able to keep up with the severest of community needs.
“I talk to homeowners all the time,” Holm says. “People call us on their worst day, not on their best day. Many of them are desperate for help, and often we can’t help them because we don’t have the resources right now in place to help everybody who calls in. That’s really my greatest concern as executive director. I really see Rebuilding Together playing a central role in addressing this issue in the region in the next 10 to 20 years because there’s just nobody else out there who has that regional scope or is willing to take it on at that level. That’s what keeps me up.”
