Christmas comes early for residents
By Sam Scott
Early in the morning on the last Saturday in April, 30 volunteers showed up at Leonela Alcazar's Lakewood Village home in north Sunnyvale, ready to work. They painted the exterior and the interior of the small flat-roofed house. They put up new window blinds, replaced the carpet, and put in new light fixtures.
They finished late that afternoon,
"It looked like a whole new house," said Diane Cooper, one of the volunteers.
The residents were equally impressed.
"Oh, it looks so much better," said Ariel Martinez, 14, who lives at the house with his aunt. He and his family helped with the work. "It looks real good."
The Alcazar home was one of two Sunnyvale houses helped by Christmas in April, a nationwide nonprofit organization with 230 chapters across the nation.
The midpeninsula branch, based in Menlo Park, sent out 5,000 volunteers to 50 homes and 12 nonprofits to locations from Daly City to Sunnyvale.
Projects begin in the winter with skilled labor, and culminate with large group projects on National Rebuilding Day, the last Saturday in April.
Loretta Cullinane, the executive director, says the group finds low-income, elderly and disabled homeowners by working with senior centers, churches, city code departments, community services and advertising in newspapers.
"We basically do whatever we can think of to get the word out to people who might need our services," she said.
In July, possible clients begin turning in the two-page applications. In the fall, they examine sites to see what projects are feasible and in January volunteers begin the more complex work.
Most of the supplies and labor are sponsored or donated by companies. McCarthy Building Company, a construction company, sponsored the work at the Alcazar home.
Cooper, a pre-construction director for McCarthy, said they've been doing it for four years and plan to continue to do so.
"It's our way of giving back to the community," she said.
With National Rebuilding Day gone for another year, things have calmed down some, but there's still work to do.
"We've got a lot of 'thank you's' we have to do," Cullinane said.
|
Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
