Sisters Michelle, left, and Marianne Gendy, both students at Wake Forest University, empty a trash can full of debris as they help revitalize an East Athens apartment building Monday. (Richard Hamm)
Perry Ransbottom could have gone on a cruise with his friends and spent this week hopping around the sandy beaches of the Caribbean.
Instead of kicking back in paradise, the Wake Forest University sophomore chose to leave Winston-Salem, N.C., to spend his spring break cleaning up an old, neglected apartment complex in East Athens to improve living conditions for some of the city’s working poor.
“Definitely, I thought it’s kind of a draw to go to the beach,” Ransbottom said Monday as he unloaded buckets of empty beer bottles and other trash. “But this is really a rewarding experience. I’m glad I chose to come here.”
Perry Ransbottom could have gone on a cruise with his friends and spent this week hopping around the sandy beaches of the Caribbean.
Instead of kicking back in paradise, the Wake Forest University sophomore chose to leave Winston-Salem, N.C., to spend his spring break cleaning up an old, neglected apartment complex in East Athens to improve living conditions for some of the city’s working poor.
“Definitely, I thought it’s kind of a draw to go to the beach,” Ransbottom said Monday as he unloaded buckets of empty beer bottles and other trash. “But this is really a rewarding experience. I’m glad I chose to come here.”
Ransbottom and a dozen other college students came to Athens through the Collegiate Challenge, the community service arm of Habitat for Humanity International, to spend the week cleaning and fixing the apartments near the corner of East Broad and Peter streets to house low-income residents. The local nonprofit ReNew Athens partnered with Athens Area Habitat for Humanity to buy and renovate the apartment building using a $302,000 federal grant.
“We want to make this a stable, decent place where people can live and raise their children,” said Spencer Frye, Habitat’s executive director, who spent part of the day supervising the student volunteer group and speaking to local residents about the project.
A group of 19 college students will stay in Athens all week to work on the rundown apartment building and repair a home in Garnett Ridge. A new group will arrive next week to pick up where they left off.
Throughout the day Monday, students removed trash and painted worn-out walls — tasks that will need to be completed before workers can begin to install new appliances, wiring and heating, and air-conditioning units to upgrade the facility.
Leslie Touassi, a sophomore from High Point University in High Point, N.C., started her first day of spring break painting the inside of an apartment, then worked to remove overgrown brush and broken glass in areas not too far away from where children play.
“I would definitely take this over your stereotypical college spring break,” Touassi said “I just feel like we’re actually accomplishing something. Hopefully, by the time we leave here, it will be suitable for kids and families so they can live and play in a safer environment.” Volunteers removed nearly two trailers full of trash and debris Monday, said Beau Harvey, a construction manager for Habitat. “I certainly want to get these tires out of here, these bottles and this glass out of here,” Harvey said. “After we do that, this place is going to start to really look spiffy.”
Out on the north side of Athens, another team of college students set out to make repairs to a once-dilapidated home off Garnett Ridge Drive that soon may be used as transitional housing to help others get back on their feet, according to Laura Dempsey, a public outreach director for Athens Habitat.
This is the seventh consecutive year the Athens nonprofit has benefited from a group of dedicated college students who’ve given up their spring breaks to complete service projects, Dempsey said. “It’s really wonderful to know that there are so many students that want to do that,” she said. “It really speeds up whatever project it is that we’re working on.”
This year, 3,396 high school and college students from across the country will spend spring break working on projects in 160 different communities, according to Habitat for Humanity International.
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