COMMENTARY
Donn Esmonde: Inner-city aid alters image of a suburb
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They are the troops of my new favorite army. The fact that they invaded from the suburbs only makes the story better.
The stereotypical elitist reputation of Orchard Park needed an adjustment after the recent fallout over the rejection by town officials of lower-income housing for senior citizens. In an image-altering antidote to the absurd exclusion, a legion of folks from Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Orchard Park descended recently on Buffalo’s Lower West Side. The outreach was a timely reminder that folks of good will exist in every town and village.
Oh, happy day.
Hundreds of members of the 3,000- strong congregation from Southwestern Boulevard joined an army of volunteers at the “Extreme Makeover” reconstruction of Delores Powell’s home on Massachusetts Avenue. The one-house resurrection memorably morphed—at the prompting of local builder David Stapleton— into a full neighborhood makeover.
The evangelical Christian congregation has for years run a food pantry in, yes, upscale Orchard Park. Whatever you do, do not tell the Town Board.
“We helped to feed 237 families last week,” the Tabernacle’s Jim McGinnis said. “There is need, even here.”
Tabernacle volunteers have, in recent years, painted houses and cleaned lots in the inner city. Then came the recent West Side mini-Woodstock.
“David called me, asked if we could help with a few houses,” said McGinnis, a tall, lean, can-do guy who goes back a quarter-century with Stapleton, with whom he used to sell real estate. “I told him we could bring in 500 volunteers.”
I ran into McGinnis on the final day of the Powell house’s “Extreme Makeover.” The Tabernacle folks, to me, represented the communal spirit that turned the transformation of a single house into the revival of an entire neighborhood.
“We ended up helping with 29 projects,” he told me. “It started with 10 houses and grew through the week.”
In an uplifting irony, volunteers from a stereotypical sheltered suburb lent a hand to folks on battered city streets. Media coverage put names and faces to the Massachusetts Avenue story, humanizing an inner-city neighborhood usually seen through flashing police lights on the TV news. At the same time, the Tabernacle volunteers cast a better light on a suburban bedroom community not known for inclusion.
“I’ve had people from the congregation say to me, ‘We need to tell [the world] we’re not all like that,’ ” McGinnis said of the town’s elitist reputation. “I’d say, no, we’re not looking for attention; we are here to serve wherever we can.”
The empathy by the Tabernacle flock emanates from experience. I talked at the site with Jim Delmont, a ruddy-faced guy who rebuilt a porch for Powell’s neighbor Sonia Herrera.
“A lot of us have gone through hard times ourselves, and God wants us to give back,” Delmont said. “I was delivered from a drug addiction and had four back surgeries.”
The neighborhood makeover succeeded where many a government-run program fails: It injected help directly into a hurting neighborhood. There was no bureaucracy, no administrative costs, no patronage hires, no dollars siphoned off.
If bureaucrats had run the show, it would have taken seven years to fix 50 houses, not seven days. That is why many of the “Extreme” players—Stapleton, AmeriCorps volunteers, housing activists, faith-based groups such as Tabernacle— want to take the “Makeover” model to other city neighborhoods.
McGinnis said he and Stapleton have already met “to try to figure out the next step.”
Whatever happens, the Tabernacle crew is on board. From Orchard Park to inner-city Buffalo, need erased every boundary.
desmonde@buffnews.com
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